


Simple Minds

by RonsGirlFriday



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1990s, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Americans, Breakfast Club References, Bullying, Community: HPFT, Detention, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Mental Health Issues, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, POV Alternating, Sexual Harassment, Stereotypes, Website: HPFanficTalk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:47:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24399721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RonsGirlFriday/pseuds/RonsGirlFriday
Summary: Six wrongdoers. Six social spheres. Six stories.One horrible vice principal (hem hem!)Eight hours stuck in a room together.Ladies and gentlemen, detention is now in session.A Breakfast Club-inspired modern AU.(For down-in-flames' Modern AU Challenge & dreamshadow's Trapped Together Challenge at HPFT)
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 58
Kudos: 84





	1. 7:27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> picspam by me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a modern AU inspired by _The Breakfast Club_. Because of this, I've set it in an American high school (in Southern California, just because that's where I am). I do realize these characters are, canonically, not American. :)

  


**_Saturday, 7:27 AM_ **

  


“How are you feeling today, Daddy?”

Dr. Xenophilius Lovegood looked up from the stack of papers he was grading -- stacks, really, the difference between the two being the copious notes in the margins of the papers on the right. The two tidy piles were the only organized things in his cramped little home office.

“I’m fine, Luna,” was his earnest reply. “Where are you off to?” He nodded at the bicycle helmet in his daughter’s hand.

“Detention, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right…” He sighed, searching through a pile of miscellaneous papers at one corner of his massive desk. “I have your slip here… somewhere… here it is!” Extracting a green piece of paper, he handed it to Luna with another sigh. “I still can’t believe you have to serve Saturday detention for handing in one assignment late.”

Luna’s mouth quirked in a little smile. “You should understand -- you don’t like it when your students’ papers are late.”

“No, but I don’t restrict their freedom for eight hours. Education has become divorced from all humanity. They pump you full of canned information and expect you to behave like robots, and then I get a bunch of eighteen year-olds who write… _uninspired_ essays because they can’t think for themselves. Are you sure you don’t want me to call the school and talk to them? You’ve never been in trouble before.”

“No, Daddy, I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it. I can go through my lines for the play; it’s what I’d be doing, anyway. Now, remember, detention lets out at four, so I’m just going to stay at school afterwards. Curtain is at seven, so no point in coming home in between.” She kissed him on the cheek and hesitated before adding, “Have you taken your medication?”

“Yes, Luna,” was his indulgent response. “That was just a bad day, you know that. I _am_ sorry.”

“I know it was, I know. I only ask because, you know… they might call you, check to see that this is really your signature.” She brandished the green paper, the form that bore Xeno Lovegood’s signature attesting that he knew his daughter was serving detention. When her father’s brow furrowed in question, she added, “I hear they sometimes do, randomly.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Tunnel-visioned martinets.”

“Good word, Daddy. Okay, I’m off. You’ll probably be asleep when I come home. I’ll be quiet. If we stay out late after the show, I’ll have Eloise drive me home, put my bike in her truck.”

Her father went back to grading papers, and Luna headed for the front door, fastening her helmet strap under her chin -- but before she reached the door, she took a quick detour into the kitchen and jotted a note, which she affixed to the fridge with a magnet:

_Daddy,_

_Remember, I’m at school all day. Detention until 4:00, and then the play after. I’ll be home late. Don’t worry!_

_School phone number: (714) 555-2000_  
_Drama office: (714) 555-2009_

_xoxo_

_PS -- Meds at 7:00 PM!_  
  


* * *

  
  
Dr. Edward Granger was still asleep, and Dr. Nora Granger was out for a run, when Hermione slipped out the front door, having left a note on the whiteboard next to the key hooks.

_Mom & Dad -- Remember, library all day w/ Susan, history project. Home before 5. Love you!_

She arrived at school fifteen minutes early, sweating slightly from the bike ride in the already-warm May morning. She reached the bike rack on the south side of the school, next to the parking lot, just as a blonde girl was locking up her own bike.

“Hey,” offered Hermione quietly as she stooped to thread the cable through her front wheel.

She knew Luna Lovegood but didn’t really _know_ Luna. They’d shared some of the same classes the past few years but had since opted for different electives. And Luna ran with the art kids -- the ones who’d always seemed to have inexplicably permissive parents -- who talked about staying out until two in the morning after shows and driving to LA on the weekends for some event or another where their parents certainly had no way of contacting them directly. Hermione’s parents always needed to know where she was.

Luckily, they were highly unlikely to page her if they thought she was working on a big final project. Outside of emergencies, they really had no reason to; as far as Dr. and Dr. Granger knew, their sixteen-year-old daughter _never_ lied.

“Hey,” replied Luna before swinging her bag onto her shoulder and heading into the school.

Hermione hooked her helmet to her backpack, swept her hair up and away from her neck into a frizzy bun, and set off in the same direction, grimacing slightly at the sound of someone’s transmission grinding in the parking lot behind her.  
  


* * *

  
  
The Oldsmobile 442 made an angry sound as Percy Weasley downshifted into first gear, and Ron clenched his teeth as Percy brought his beloved car to a clumsy stop at the entrance to the school. They’d all learned to drive on a stick shift, so how his brother still managed to be completely graceless about it was beyond Ron.

“Can’t believe Mom’s letting you drive my car,” he added, not for the first or last time, still incensed at the injustice of the whole thing. He’d bought that car outright with his own hard-earned savings when it was a pile of junk and fixed it up with Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan in Dean’s dad’s shop. “If you fuck up my transmission, I swear to God…”

“Hey! Language.” Percy raised his eyebrows at his little brother. “Look, shuttling you around isn’t exactly my idea of a good time on my first week of summer break. Especially to _detention._ I seriously can’t believe you -- ”

“You know what, Harvard, don’t start. Already got it from Mom.” Ron grabbed his backpack off the floorboard and cracked the passenger door. “I get out at four.” He had one leg out the door when he was interrupted by his brother.

“Hey, by the way.” Percy reached into the driver’s door pocket, producing a strip of condoms that were stowed there and tossing them at Ron, continuing in a sardonic tone. “Nice place for these. If you’re going to take anything away from Fred and George, it should be how to hide your shit better. If Mom found these, she would freak. And they degrade in heat. Dumbass. I’ll see you at four.”

Rolling his eyes, Ron jammed the pack of rubbers in the front pocket of his backpack, extracted his long-limbed body from the car, and slammed the door.  
  


* * *

  
  
Frank Longbottom whistled appreciatively as the 442 in front of him pulled out of the lot.

“Nice car. Someone did some great work on that thing. Too bad that guy drives it like an idiot.” He made a _tsk_ sound before wrapping his arm around the passenger seat headrest and addressing his son. “You all right, chief?”

Neville, in fact, felt sick to his stomach, but he nodded silently, staring at his lap.

“Hey.” Frank gripped Neville’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. We talked about this, didn’t we?”

Neville nodded again and hugged his backpack.

“Look, I don’t agree with them giving you detention, but it is what it is. The world’s all soft now, and this is how they do things. But I’m not upset at you.”

“Grandma is.”

Frank sighed. “Grandma is Grandma, and she always will be. I’m proud of you. You handled your own problem. And that kid’ll never mess with you again.”

Neville wasn’t so sure of that. His longtime bully would probably just renew his efforts with four of his closest friends.

“And what are you worried about? You get eight hours to relax, do nothing.” Frank shrugged, clearly making an effort to say his next words in an approximation of a supportive tone. “You can, you know… play your little game…”

“Well, I don’t think we’ll be allowed to.” There also was really no good way to play Magic: The Gathering by oneself, but it didn’t seem worth trying to explain that to his dad.

“Well… I don’t know, chief. Maybe it’ll be good for you, to spend a few hours away from it. Time to grow up, you know?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Okay. See you at four, buddy.”

Neville kept his eyes on the ground as he exited the car and headed into school, hoping to avoid contact with any students who happened to be milling around. This close to the end of the school year, the season seemed to be over for all sports, but the color guard was out practicing on the football field, JROTC could be heard chanting cadences and ‘Yessiring’ in the distance, and the skaters would soon turn the far side of the parking lot into their own personal skate park.

“Longbottom!”

He tensed and glanced up to see Draco Malfoy overtaking him on his right. Despite the projected high of eighty degrees that day, for some reason Malfoy was wearing his letterman jacket, his backpack slung indifferently over one shoulder.

“‘Sup, buddy?” As he spoke, Malfoy clicked his car remote over his shoulder; the alarm on his BMW chirped in response.

Neville, who was not, never had been, and never in this lifetime would be, Draco Malfoy’s buddy, responded with a wary “Hi…” and kept walking.

“Whatcha doin’ here?” Malfoy flashed an insincere grin, his eyes gleaming. “Here for your rematch with Montague?”

Neville tried to control his facial expression, but Malfoy obviously caught his look of sheer panic, because the blond boy snickered.

“Chillax, man. I’m kidding. I’m pretty sure he said Monday.”

This was not helpful.

“Besides,” added Malfoy, “you got those fists of fury.” He threw a few ironic air punches, walking backwards just ahead of Neville, before turning and continuing on his way, waving over his shoulder. “Late!”

Neville glanced all around him -- for a wild moment expecting Ted Montague to materialize out of thin air, or maybe pop out from behind a row of lockers -- before squaring his shoulders and continuing to his destination.  
  


* * *

  
  
**_7:55 AM_ **

  


“Well, this looks like a party.”

Draco Malfoy wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected to see when he walked into Mr. Vector’s math classroom for detention, but if he’d had to guess, teacher’s pet Hermione Granger and her 4.4 GPA would have been at the bottom of that list. She was sitting in the front row at perfect attention as if expecting a lecture to begin at any second, and she threw him the briefest of glances but otherwise did not react to his arrival.

The presence of Poetry Slam Lovegood was also slightly interesting, though Draco at least suspected he knew the reason she was here. She was pretzeled in her seat at the end of one row with her foot propped in front of her on the desk, drawing on her All Stars with a Sharpie, and she didn’t seem to notice or care that another person had entered the room.

He supposed Weasley wasn’t really surprising. The redhead -- who seemed to lack any kind of personality or point aside from breathing perfectly good air -- was slouched in his seat one row from the back, his tall frame comically huge for the combination chair and desk. Arms crossed in front of a Green Day t-shirt, he threw Draco an unmistakable look of distaste as Draco selected a seat two spaces behind Hermione.

Draco hadn’t been expecting detention to be fun, necessarily. But this group was about as far from a good time as you could get. There weren’t even any stoners -- that might have been entertaining, at least.

On second thought, maybe Weasley blazed -- but in a sad way, with the other kids in shop class. Not like his older brothers, the ones Draco had always heard were a good time at parties.

With nothing better to do, Draco checked the pager on his belt; there was nothing, but it was still early. He looked up in time to see Loserville get a little more losery: that Longbottom kid hovered nervously in the doorway, his cheeks pink and already sweating from the warmth of the morning -- not to mention that he was, well, a little out of shape.

“Aw, man!” he exclaimed. “They got you for that? Weak.”

For some reason, Longbottom didn’t seem at all appreciative of the fact that someone like Draco was being generous enough to express support for him. Longbottom slumped into a seat somewhere between Hermione and Poetry Slam, giving no response when Draco continued, “Does that mean Montague’s gonna be here, too? This day just got a lot more excit--”

“Montague didn’t get in trouble,” offered Weasley, and Draco rotated in his seat to stare at him, though the redhead didn’t lift his eyes from an indistinct spot in front of his own desk. “He came out of it with a bloody nose and ran to McGonagall like a little bitch and played the victim.”

“Was I talking to you?”

When he was satisfied that Weasley had nothing further to say, Draco faced forward again and removed a pen from his bag; then he tipped his desk forward on its front legs and reached out with the pen to poke Hermione in the shoulder.

“Hey. Why are you here?” When she shrugged him off, he addressed the group at large, “I think I have an idea, but anyone wanna place bets on why Straight Edge is in here? Low stakes, so Weasley can buy in. Maybe a quarter-- ”

Weasley muttered something that sounded a lot like, “Blow me,” and Draco whipped around.

“What did you say to me?”

“ _Hem hem._ ”

All heads turned to the doorway, where Vice Principal Umbridge stood surveying them. She sauntered slowly to the front of the room, hands clasped in front of her. A garish gold brooch gleamed on the lapel of her boxy, bright pink blazer. Draco could only assume she had raided Bea Arthur’s closet sometime in the eighties.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.”

An indistinct murmur rippled through the room.

“I said, _good morning, ladies and gentlemen._ ”

“Good morning,” they chorused apathetically.

“There should be six of you. There are only five. Where is he?”

“We don’t even know who it is,” began Hermione.

“I didn’t ask you, Miss Granger.”

Behind him, Draco heard Weasley let out a soft snort of derision.

“Well, while we’re waiting for Mr. Potter to grace us with his presence, I’ll collect your forms. Hand them up here, please.”

Draco accepted Weasley’s signed green form and passed both of theirs to Hermione as Longbottom did the same with his and Poetry Slam’s. Hermione handed the entire stack to Umbridge, who began leafing through them.

“No forgery this time, Miss Lovegood?” she commented in a patronizing tone. Poetry Slam did not respond.

Umbridge reviewed the slips in her hand a second time. “Miss Granger, where is yours?”

Hermione gave an indiscernible response.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I… I don’t have it.” Her voice grew a little louder as she began rambling. “I didn’t realize it was something I needed to bring, I thought it was just a reminder about the detention, and I wrote the date in my calendar so I didn’t think I needed -- ”

“You thought it was for your convenience?”

A shocked pause followed before Hermione continued. Draco couldn’t see her face but could only imagine the expression on it. “Well, I… I’m sorry, I didn’t know it had to be brought back with me. I’ve never had detention before, I’ve never been in trouble, it was an honest -- ”

“Yes, I’m aware you’ve never been in trouble, it’s all I’ve heard about from the other faculty. Do you think that entitles you to special treatment?”

“No!”

“And are you in the habit of not reading important instructions?”

Hermione hesitated. “No…”

“Well, did you not think it was important?”

“I… I don’t know…”

Draco was pretty sure he knew exactly what was going on here. He didn’t know Hermione all that well -- shared a few classes here and there, enough to know she was entirely obnoxious -- but he distinctly recalled one time in eighth grade English when she had pointed out a typo in Mr. Lockhart’s instructions for a writing assignment, which had resulted in everyone having to write an essay of 1,000 words instead of 100 as the instructions had originally said. There was no way she hadn’t read that detention form.

Umbridge had figured it out, too. She studied the girl in front of her for a moment, and her voice grew very soft. “Do your parents even know you’re serving detention today?”

“Y-yes, of course,” replied Hermione in a tone that Draco was pretty sure convinced nobody.

“I’ll just go call them right now and check, hmm?”

Hermione was making soft sounds that resembled the beginnings of stifled tears. It seemed a little dramatic to Draco. She’d brought it on herself, really.

“Miss Granger, I’ll ask you again: Do your parents know you’re here?”

The brunette shook her head again. Everyone else in the room seemed to be holding their breath.

“You seem to have enjoyed an untouchable status in your academic career, Miss Granger, and I think it’s gone to your head,” said Umbridge in a way that was both saccharine and snide. “Personally, I thought you should have been suspended and given an automatic F for the semester, but I was overruled. Because apparently you are perfect. Well, I look forward to telling Principal Dumbledore that you are not, in fact, perfect. After I call your parents. And in the meantime, you will be writing some lines for me.”

Draco had no idea who else in the world besides Umbridge assigned lines to anybody older than twelve. But more importantly, what in the hell had Straight Edge done that would warrant suspension and an automatic fail?

With a little hiccup, Hermione reached into her bag for a notebook, but Umbridge held up a hand.

“Not there. On the blackboard.”

Draco couldn’t decide whether to feel bad for the girl or be entertained as all hell. Umbridge was going for maximum humiliation, and while he had no idea what exactly it was about Hermione Granger that had got so far under the vice principal’s skin, he couldn’t deny it was gratifying in a way to see Little Miss Perfect taken down a peg.

Umbridge pulled a chair up to the chalkboard at the front of the room and stood on it to reach the very top corner, where she began writing, _I must not tell_ — but then she stopped, reconsidered, and erased the writing and started anew.

_I cannot follow simple instructions._

Stepping down with a satisfied expression, she began, “You will write this five hundred times— ”

“Five hundred?!” exclaimed Hermione. “How will that even fit on the board?”

“Write small, Miss Granger. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out. Well, Mr. Potter.” Umbridge’s change of subject drew everyone’s attention to the doorway, where the stringy kid had appeared, a skateboard under one arm and a Discman in his hand, the headphones slung around his neck. “How nice of you to join us. And I’ll have those, please.”

Potter pulled the headphones from his neck and placed them, along with the CD player and a folded green paper he produced from his pocket, into a box on the table in front of Umbridge instead of in her outstretched hand.

On his way to grab a seat, Potter faltered in his step for a second, and he gave a distinctly weird look, first to Hermione and then to Weasley, before selecting a seat three spots over from Draco, adjacent to Weasley.

“You’re late, Mr. Potter. Are you looking for another detention?”

“No, but I’m sure I’ll get one anyway.”

“Why are you late?”

Potter appeared to think for a minute. “Traffic?”

She regarded him coolly. “I’ll see you back here next Saturday.”

Potter raised the sign of the horns, an unspoken _Rock on._ Despite Draco’s morbid curiosity over being able to observe Harry Potter for a solid eight hours, Draco was tired of him already.

“We’re off to an inauspicious start, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you’ve all got it out of your systems. There will be no talking, no singing, no noise of any kind. You will stay in your seats. You may do homework. You may not nap. If you need the bathroom, you may go one at a time, and you must take this pass.” She held up a plastic unicorn, on which was inscribed _Room 7 Hall Pass._ (For some reason Mr. Vector, like most other teachers, seemed to think that forcing students to carry an embarrassing hall pass would discourage them from taking bathroom breaks in the middle of class).

“Since the bathroom is fifteen yards away, there is no reason you need to be gone more than five minutes. There is no eating, except at lunch time when I tell you so, and no gum-chewing. If I catch any one of you in violation of these rules, you will be spending every Saturday here with me for the next month.”

“Now,” she continued, picking up the box from the table in front of her. “Electronics. Everyone. Up here, now.”

Draco watched as Hermione and Potter each deposited pagers into the box, but nobody else moved.

“I am about to start going through backpacks.”

At that, Poetry Slam unzipped her backpack and withdrew a Discman (probably containing the angry chick rock greatest hits), dropping it into the box, and Draco reluctantly handed over his own, in addition to his pager.

Umbridge stared expectantly at Weasley, who stated, “I don’t have any.”

“Let’s see.”

“I told you I don’t have anything — hey!” he protested as Umbridge unceremoniously took hold of his backpack and unzipped the various compartments.

After a moment, Umbridge raised her eyebrows at something in the front pocket. Withdrawing a strip of condoms for everyone’s view, she sneered, “Really, Mr. Weasley?”

Potter snickered, but Draco couldn’t help himself, and as Weasley buried his red face in his hands Draco let out an entirely unrestricted laugh until Umbridge shot him a look. He cleared his throat and locked it up until he felt like his head would explode from the effort.

After Potter, who apparently knew the drill, demonstrated the absence of any contraband in his own backpack, Umbridge moved on to Longbottom, who did the same. The only objectionable item found in his bag was a deck of Magic cards, which Longbottom seemed bummed to lose for the day, though he made no complaint.

“Now,” she said, clutching the box in front of her with the air of accepting an Academy Award, “while I’m sure I would love to spend eight hours in the presence of the finest this generation has to offer, I do have work to do. I’ll be in my office, but I’ll be checking in frequently and without warning. I suggest you use this time to think about why you’re here and whether this is the kind of company you’d really like to keep for the rest of your lives.”

Then, with one last visual sweep of the room, she was gone, the door slamming shut behind her with an anticlimactic _thud._

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to this... insane thing I wrote. First and foremost, thank you to aurevoir for the beta! <3
> 
> This will be 4 chapters long.
> 
> The title "Simple Minds" is also the name of the band that recorded the iconic _Breakfast Club_ theme song "Don't You (Forget About Me)."
> 
> While this is a modern AU, I've decided to stick with the characters' canon dates of birth, so this is set during May 1997, when they're all about 16-17 years old.
> 
> The one fudge here would be Hermione's age. Canonically, she was born in September 1979 and is almost a whole year older than Harry because apparently the cut-off for Hogwarts is age 11 by September 1 -- otherwise she'd have probably started school the year before him. So in the real world, at least where I'm from, with a September 1979 birthday she absolutely would have started school a year before Harry and Ron. To keep her in the same grade as them here, I've fudged her age so she's referenced being 16 in this fic, not 17.
> 
> If you're curious how Percy's on summer break already when Ron's school year is still underway, it's because some colleges and high schools run August-May, whereas some run Sept-June.
> 
> JROTC is the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, an elective, federally-sponsored military program in American high schools.
> 
> I've dropped a few little _Breakfast Club_ references throughout the fic, and I won't list them all in the notes, but I hope you catch them! (E.g. a little twist on the usage of the sign of the horns, and a little nod to Bender's movie line, "Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?") Let me know in if/when you find them!


	2. 8:25

Between the scrape and squeak of chalk on blackboard as Hermione worked on her lines -- having first subdivided the board with vertical and horizontal lines in some apparent effort to make sure everything would fit perfectly -- and Malfoy whistling “I Believe I Can Fly” -- for some godforsaken reason -- Ron’s nerves were close to shot, and it had only been half an hour since Vice Principal Umbridge had left.

He glanced at the clock. 8:25.

Jesus Christ, it had only been fifteen minutes.

Luna Lovegood was once again drawing on her Converse, Neville Longbottom was tapping the pads of his fingers nervously but silently on his desk, and Harry Potter was slouched in his chair, head back, staring at the ceiling. Nobody was looking at or talking to anyone.

Ron had no idea how Fred and George had got through so many of these without going completely insane. (Well, arguably they hadn’t.)

He felt his face color again as he glanced down at his backpack and saw the open front pocket. Stupid Umbridge. Stupid Percy. Stupid -- 

“Snape?”

Ron’s head snapped up to see Harry glancing at him over his shoulder. It took him a second to process what Harry was asking.

“Yeah.” He’d forgotten that Harry had been waiting outside Mr. Snape’s classroom when Ron had left earlier that week after being chewed out.

“Man, fuck that guy.” Harry’s voice was low.

“You too?”

“Yeah. Wait, he didn’t get you for that one thing, did he?”

“Nah. Wait, why, was that you?”

Harry shrugged vaguely. “It’s always something, dude.” It didn’t exactly answer the question, but Ron didn’t really care either way; Snape was an arbitrary jerk who played favorites, and if Harry was the one who’d done it, Ron was almost inclined to like him more.

Malfoy stopped whistling. “Wait, you guys both did something to piss off Snape? How? That guy’s class is _not_ that hard.” When he looked away again, Ron made a jerking gesture with his fist, drawing a snicker from Harry.

Ron and Harry didn’t know each other well, but they seemed to have reached some common ground where they could exist companionably using as few words as possible. They were auto shop partners on occasion, and Harry was competent, didn’t dick around, and always put his tools away. They both thought Mr. Snape, the science teacher, was an asshat and that Draco Malfoy and the rest of the unofficial royalty at this school were douchebags. They seemed to share similar tastes in music, though lately Harry had been on a weird seventies rock kick, the stuff Ron’s brother Bill liked to listen to.

With a little sigh, Ron began to dig in his backpack for a pencil and his math homework. He just needed something to stare at besides the wall.

“Shit!” he hissed as a brown spider crawled out of the side pocket of the backpack, and he promptly dropped the bag and compulsively brushed his hands over his chest and arms to rid himself of the tingly, crawling feeling, shaking out his arms with a silent shudder. He located the spider scuttling away across the floor before gingerly opening the main compartment of his backpack with only the tips of his fingers while gritting his teeth.

Unfortunately, the sound of Ron fumbling his bag seemed to draw the attention of Malfoy, who glanced back at him as he retrieved his homework, obviously recalling what else had come out of the backpack not twenty minutes earlier.

“So, Weasley. Who’d you plan on nailing today?”

Ron pointedly ignored him, taking longer than necessary turning to the right page in his math book.

“Thought your lady dumped you.”

Ron’s face was on fire. For someone who never gave him the time of day except to insult him, Malfoy sure was interested in his personal business.

“You must be real in demand to be walking around with those things on hand,” added Malfoy with a scoff before glancing up to the front of the classroom. “Or maybe you heard Not-So-Straight-Edge was gonna be here -- ”

At that, the chalk plummeted from Hermione’s hand to the floor as she noticeably stiffened. She was standing on a chair to reach the top of the board, and Ron hauled himself out of his seat without thinking to retrieve the chalk and return it to her, though Luna had done the same and got there before him.

“Shut up,” he shot as he resumed his seat. “My brother found them in my car, so I put ‘em in my backpack so he couldn’t show ‘em to my mom.”

“In your car??” repeated Malfoy, genuinely thrown off his current track -- at almost the exact same second as Harry drawled, “You know they degrade in heat, right, dude?”

“Shit, even Longbottom knows that,” sneered Malfoy. “Don’t you, Longbottom?”

Neville looked up nervously. “Um… well, extreme heat and cold, like anything, can break down the polymers -- ”

“See?” Malfoy threw him a smug look as Ron returned his attention to his math homework -- or tried -- if only to give himself something to do.

Ron had almost started to appreciate the edgy silence that had fallen again -- though it definitely wasn’t doing anything to make the numbers more interesting -- when Malfoy started back up, clearly unable to go two minutes without being the center of attention.

“When you think about it,” he began, in an affectedly innocent way that made Ron slam his pencil down in irritation, “this is actually the perfect opportunity for Straight Edge to get back at McLaggen.”

Hermione’s hand jerked as she wrote, and she reached down for the eraser but said nothing, her face concealed behind her mass of hair that she had previously released from its bun.

“I know Weasley doesn’t _seem_ like a step up, but let’s think about this. It’s poetic, right? Last I heard, Cormac’s going out with Lavender now -- that girl’s definitely upward bound -- ”

Ron gritted his teeth.

“ -- and it would _really_ wig him out. Anyone who goes around bragging about sex that much is hella insecure -- ”

“Oh, that’s ironic,” muttered Harry. Malfoy shot him a look but didn’t say anything, and Ron knew that, as much as Malfoy would never admit it, he was a little scared of Harry Potter, just like everyone else at this school.

“He’d totally wonder why,” Malfoy continued. “I don’t see that he’s all that impressive anyway. I mean, I get everyone always wants to date the football player, but I really don’t know why. No subtlety. It’s a whole culture of beating something with a stick to solve a problem.”

“Isn’t that literally what you do in baseball?” interjected Ron, unable to help himself.

The blond shortstop ignored the comment as he rose from his seat, hands stowed in the pockets of his letterman jacket. He ambled towards the board, where Hermione was resolutely ignoring him, though her writing had slowed. “Now Weasley over here -- well, you’re a mechanic, right?” He threw Ron a look, and when the latter didn’t respond, he encouraged, “You can build an engine, can’t you?”

Ron only glared, but that was good enough for Malfoy, who addressed Hermione in a conspiratorial stage whisper: “Means he’s good with his hands.”

“Why are you such a raging creep?!” she protested shrilly, whipping around and almost toppling off her chair in the process. She caught herself by flinging her arm against the blackboard, smearing about two dozen cramped lines in the process.

“He’s bored,” piped up Harry in a nonchalant tone. “It’s what happens when you’re handed everything your entire life.”

A faint flush overtook Malfoy’s pale face as he stared daggers at Harry. The latter seemed to have struck a nerve, because any concern Malfoy might have had about Harry’s questionable reputation went out the window as he retorted, “Oh, are we gonna pretend I’m the only one?”

Harry did not respond but sat up a little straighter as Malfoy continued, “Yeah, everyone here knows who your family was. If your mom and dad were still alive —”

“Don’t you talk about my mom and dad,” shot Harry in a dangerous tone Ron had never had the misfortune to hear from him -- but Malfoy ploughed on, even while the rest of the room tensed as if he’d just sauntered onto a field full of land mines.

“If your mom and dad were alive you’d be hanging out at the same clubs as mine. You’d be a polo-wearing, tennis-playing motherfucker, and you’d own a horse that you pay someone else to take care of so you can ride it once every two months.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Harry’s voice was icy, and even from a couple of rows back, Ron could tell that Harry had his arms crossed as tightly as humanly possible.

“I know you got a lotta balls talking about me when you’re probably sitting on a trust fund bigger than the annual budget for the entire school district.”

By now, even Hermione had stopped her work at the board and turned -- along with everyone -- to stare at Harry. In response, he used his left foot to flip over his skateboard so that it was once again on its wheels and sent it flying forcefully towards the wall, where it hit with a crash.

For whatever reason -- possibly because he’d considered how lucky he was not to have had his ass kicked by now -- Malfoy stopped talking, and an uneasy silence overtook the room once more. Shocked as he was -- and feeling weirdly misled, as ridiculous as he knew it was -- Ron swallowed the questions that had risen in his throat.

  


* * *

  


Luna liked drama club, not drama the concept, and she’d always been content to exist on the edges of the little society that formed in any school -- a perfect microcosm of society at large -- but that didn’t mean she didn’t hear things. After all, how could you act -- or write -- or do anything to explore the human condition -- if, well, you didn’t pay attention to people?

The rumor mill usually revealed more about the people talking than the people being talked about, and while it was none of Luna’s business either way, she wasn’t inclined to believe, for example, all those things that Cormac McLaggen and his friends had been spreading around the school about what Hermione had supposedly done with him. Luna thought they should all be suspended for it no matter whether it was true, but the administration was a lot more concerned with policing the length of girls’ skirts and the thickness of their tank top straps than protecting them from harassment.

But where Hermione was noticeably upset about those rumors, Harry Potter had -- as far as she knew -- never given any reaction to the things being whispered about him. Not until today with Draco. Which was odd considering that what Draco had just said made perfect, reasonable sense. Luna couldn’t believe nobody had ever thought about it before -- including herself.

Harry had disappeared abruptly in the middle of second grade -- or at least, from the perspective of an eight-year-old, he had disappeared. Luna couldn’t really remember what his classmates had been told… probably that he’d moved away. As far as Luna knew, nobody from Hogsmeade Elementary -- nearly all of whom attended Hogwarts High now -- had heard from him again, until he resurfaced at the beginning of the previous school year as a sophomore.

It was then that the whispers had started, as the information that had been shielded from young minds -- and that they’d had no reason to ask or think about until now -- began to circulate. One by one, the students at Hogwarts had become aware of what the news-watching public had known all along: eight-year-old Harry Potter had watched from a closet as Tom Riddle -- one of the worst serial killers to terrorize Southern California in recent years -- had murdered his parents. At the mere age of eleven, Harry had been the prosecution’s star witness in a highly publicized murder trial.

To teenaged minds, this made Harry Potter both fascinating and disturbing. When Harry had rejoined the student body the previous year, underweight, withdrawn, rough around the edges, landing himself in detention almost immediately -- combined with the rumors that he’d been kicked out of St. Brutus’s Continuation School, a place built to handle even the worst discipline cases -- the speculation emerged that Harry Potter was not right in the head, and probably had not been since the age of eight.

From what little Luna had observed directly, Harry clearly had no problem mouthing off to authority or cutting class, and he did seem perfectly happy to exist on the fringe of high school society with the other kids nobody dared talk to, though Luna wasn’t quite sure she believed the gossip about him having stabbed a kid at his old school or having been raised in a cult for the preceding seven years.

What nobody ever bothered to talk about, however -- maybe because they were so far removed from the events by now, and it was hardly as salacious as the murder itself -- was that Harry’s father had been the heir to a not-insignificant commercial real estate empire in the Southland. Luna didn’t know much about the specifics, only that the names James and Lily Potter apparently meant something at the time they were killed and that, due to their wealth, the cops had first believed their murders to be a home invasion robbery gone wrong. But they weren’t movie star famous, so that detail wasn’t particularly interesting to the Hogwarts student body, and nobody would look at the state of Harry’s clothes and think ‘trust fund baby.’ Luna definitely hadn’t bothered to think where the wealth had gone after the murders (if she even bothered to think about Harry Potter’s personal business at all).

Whatever the reality behind the rumors, Draco Malfoy seemed to believe enough of them to back off when Harry had seemed on the verge of exploding just now, and a thick silence blanketed the room, save for the clicking and scraping of Hermione writing her lines. As Luna withdrew her script for the play from her backpack, she wondered what act of God it would take to get Vice Principal Umbridge fired for the sadistic way she seemed to enjoy humiliating students for minor transgressions. Luna would have loved nothing more than to tell her dad about it, to hear him rant and rave about bullies and cowards using the education system as a way to victimize youth, but he also wouldn’t be able to stop himself contacting the school to give them a piece of his mind… and the less contact Xenophilius Lovegood had with the school administration, the better.

A low rustle of activity slowly filled the room as Hermione continued to work at the board, Neville began drawing in a notebook and mumbling to himself about ‘mana’ and ‘counterspells,’ Ron jiggled one leg as he stared at his textbook, Harry scooted his skateboard back and forth rhythmically on the floor in front of him, and Draco drummed obnoxiously on his desk. When Luna was positive someone was going to finally snap, Hermione chose that moment to take a break, setting down her chalk and resuming her seat, flexing and shaking her hand. 

“Did you seriously just not tell your parents you had detention and show up without their signature?” asked Draco abruptly. “How did you think that was gonna go?”

Hermione sighed and did not look at him, placing her forehead in her hands. “I just… I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell them. And I thought, you know… well, it _would_ be reasonable if I didn’t know the form was supposed to be signed! I’m not the kind of person who’s normally in here, they know that -- ”

Harry let out a scoff that almost sounded resentful, though Luna didn’t know him well enough to be sure.

“ -- and I’ve never lied, so -- ”

“Until you did,” said Draco lightly.

“What?” Hermione whipped around to face him.

“You never lied until you did.”

Hermione’s face flushed and she faced forward again.

“So, what did you actually do, though?” he pressed. “It’s gotta be pretty bad. You know, if you don’t tell people, it just makes ‘em more curious. Then they assume things, and that’s how rumors get started -- ”

“ _What?_ ” she snarled, just about giving herself whiplash now. “What would they _assume?_ ”

“Well, the way I heard it, you got caught in the middle of a private tour of the boys’ locker room -- ”

“That’s a lie!” she cried, her eyes glistening, at the same time as just about everyone else in the room made small sounds of protest -- except for Neville, who seemed to have spent the past hour trying to make himself as small as possible in his own seat.

“You’re really concerned what everyone here did,” interjected Ron, “so how ‘bout you?”

Draco shrugged. “It’s not interesting, what I did. Longbottom, he’s interesting. Montague’s been messing with him for, what, years? Longbottom goes all Rocky on him? _That’s_ interesting. Poetry Slam -- well, I thought she got nailed for making out with her girlfriend in the quad, but now I’m not so sure, Umbridge said something about forgery -- ”

Luna tensed but did not give him the satisfaction of a response. She _had_ been written up for kissing Padma in the quad at lunchtime -- apparently that was ‘causing a scene,’ while Michael Corner and Ginny Weasley doing the same thing twenty yards away was totally normal -- but that wasn’t what had landed her in detention.

“Hey,” Harry interrupted Draco’s monologue, throwing his hands in the air impatiently. “I got busted for changing Snape’s gradebook. Is that interesting enough? Is that enough for you to jerk off to for the next hour so we can all chill out?”

A moment followed wherein Hermione fixed Harry with a shocked and horrified look, and Draco simply looked impressed.

At last, Draco asked, “Well, did you at least do everyone else a solid and change theirs, too, while you were in there?”

  


* * *

  


**_10:15 AM_ **

Harry didn’t know why detention couldn’t just be peaceful, like it was with the usual suspects. Harry liked Theo Nott and Lisa Turpin, mainly because they could go eight hours without saying more than ten words. But this crew was something else. With the possible exception of Longbottom -- who was so damn nervous for no apparent reason -- every single person there seemed incapable of going without some kind of attention or affirmation. By contrast, Andrew Kirke -- also a frequent flyer in these detentions -- and his stupid hacky sack that he never stopped playing with, seemed downright relaxing.

Hermione Granger had her nose so high in the air, Harry was surprised she could see where she was going, and she very clearly believed she did not belong here with _these types_. She was currently sitting with her nose in a book, though she kept glancing up at the board where her lines were not writing themselves, and Harry could only assume she was too mortified from the earlier argument to stand up in front of everyone again.

Luna Lovegood hadn’t said much, but she was one of those art kids who emanated the self-satisfaction that came from existing on a more enlightened plane than everyone else.

Ron Weasley was an okay dude (and damn, could he build a mighty fine car), but that chip on his shoulder seemed more like a small planet now that he was forced to spend eight hours in a room with the prom prince elect, and he had an inability to shut his mouth when something pissed him off.

And Draco Malfoy just spoke for himself. Literally.

“Longbottom.”

Harry lifted his head off his arms folded atop his desk -- he’d been trying in vain to fall asleep -- to see Malfoy leaning towards Longbottom, speaking in a loud whisper that everybody could obviously hear. Malfoy had managed to go nearly an hour now without talking. Good for him.

“Longbottom. Got your tux already?”

“Hmm?” Longbottom looked up from a notebook he was doodling in.

“For the prom. You’re going, right?”

Harry thought it was an interesting choice to be needling the kid who had finally hauled off and slugged Montague the other day.

“Why are you messing with him?” sighed Ron, who seemed to have been staring at the same page in his math book for the past hour.

“Who said I’m messing with him?” asked Malfoy innocently. When Ron didn’t answer, Malfoy plastered a look of shock and indignation across his face. “ _Oh._ Oh, wait a minute. Did you automatically assume that Longbottom wouldn’t be going? That’s not cool, dude.”

Ron crossed his arms and shook his head irritably.

“Fine, what about you?” Malfoy insisted, raising his eyebrows at the redhead. “Who’re you taking now that Lavender’s playing full contact with Cormac?”

“Why, you asking me to dance?” retorted Ron.

“Ooh, you know what, that reminds me though.” Malfoy twisted in his chair, now looking to Luna, who was leaning back with her feet propped on another chair, eyes closed, silently reciting something to herself. “Hey. Alanis. Going to the prom with your girlfriend?”

Harry did not much care for the tone of voice in which Malfoy said the last word.

“What do you think?” Luna replied coolly, at the same time as Harry heard himself growling, “Hey, lay off her.”

“I don’t need you to speak for me,” she said curtly, staring Harry straight in the eye, somehow more upset with him sticking up for her than she’d been with Malfoy. Harry didn’t know why, but was certain he didn’t deserve it.

“He knows exactly what he’s doing,” he argued, fixing Malfoy with a glare. “You know _exactly_ what you’re asking her. You’re on student council, yeah? So you and everyone else in here know that you wouldn’t sell tickets to two girls together even if they did ask. So stop fucking with her.”

“Look, it’s the school rules, I didn’t make it up.” Malfoy ran an apathetic hand through his hair. “Why do you care so much? Wanna take your boyfriend? Or maybe you really liked that little show Melissa Etheridge here put on with Padma in the quad the other day -- ”

Harry sprang to his feet with half a mind to bring some truth to those rumors he knew people liked to spread about him. “Go on, keep talking!”

Ron was on his feet just as fast, one hand to Harry’s chest. “Whoa. Chill. Chill.”

“Shut up, all of you!” protested Hermione. “Umbridge is going to hear us from a mile away!”

“Please,” scoffed Malfoy, entirely unconcerned about any of it. “She’s probably two episodes into _Days of Our Lives_ right now.”

Meanwhile, Luna was still focused on completely misdirecting her anger towards Harry.

“This is none of your business,” she shot. Most of the time, she seemed to talk in an airy way, like she were in a coffee shop talking about how some foreign flick really ‘spoke to her,’ but now her voice was flat. “I don’t even care. I don’t appreciate you making this about you.”

Harry wasn’t usually in the business of sharing his personal problems, and while he didn’t really care what people said about him, he had to admit it was nice that people left him alone because of the bizarre mythos that seemed to have sprouted up around him -- but at this moment, he was just so goddamn annoyed that every person in this room -- in this school -- seemed to think _they_ had problems, when they had no idea what real problems were.

“Oh, you know what,” he fired back, “you don’t get to call dibs on whose issue it is. Today it’s not letting two girls go to a fucking dance, tomorrow it’s fucking CPS deciding to leave a kid in a shit house because the only person who really cares about him happens to be a dude who likes other dudes.” He tensed and caught himself, adding quickly, “Or they think he is.”

Five pairs of eyes stared at him in varying stages of shock, confusion, and comprehension. But he’d be damned if they looked at him with pity, so he added heatedly, “Sorry the truth isn’t so entertaining. I’m sure you liked the other stories better. And by the way, if you all thought that someone could _really_ do something bad enough to get expelled from _St. Brutus’s_ and still be allowed to come back to a public school, you’re even bigger fucking idiots than you look.”

The stunned silence persisted until Ron, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other, took a futile stab at smoothing things over in a low voice. “Social services just tries to do the best they can, man -- ”

“Fuck CPS,” said Harry shortly, avoiding everyone’s eyes now. “Ass backwards, think blood connections are magic.”

“Well, their priority is to keep families together.”

“That’s a crock,” offered Luna resentfully, precipitating another excruciatingly still and silent moment, like someone had hit pause on a VCR at the worst possible moment.

True to form, Malfoy chose a tactful way to break the ice. “Got a lot of experience with Child Protective Services at your house, Weasley?”

Ron took the bait. “Fuck you. My dad’s a social worker.”

“Oh, wow. So do you, like, get extra food stamps or -- ”

Malfoy’s desk crashed to the ground when Ron launched himself at him, both boys ending up in a heap, grappling awkwardly, impeded by the desk between them; the arm that connected the desk and chair pinned Draco underneath as Ron grabbed and swung at him from above.

“Cut it out!” hissed Hermione, who had stationed herself at the door during this exchange, cracking it an inch and peering outside. “Umbridge is coming!”

With Neville’s help, Harry seized Ron’s shirt and pulled him back, and Luna was able to help Malfoy right his desk, everyone returning to their own seats a split second before the door was flung open, Hermione having shut it again after alerting everyone.

“ _What_ is going on here?” demanded Umbridge with an ugly glare.

“Nothing,” mumbled six voices.

“Why did I hear a ruckus?”

Nobody answered.

“Well?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before Luna spoke. “Oh, _that_ ruckus.”

“Yes, Miss Lovegood, _that_ ruckus.”

“There was a spider,” said Luna simply.

Umbridge did not look impressed. “A spider.”

“A really big one. And Ron’s scared of them and -- ”

“Hey!” protested Ron -- but his flushed indignation seemed to give Umbridge some pause before she shifted her inquiry.

“And why is Mr. Malfoy’s nose bleeding? Is that also from the spider?”

Malfoy wiped his nose on the inside of his shirt collar, smearing a bit of blood across his cheek, before wiping his hand on his jeans. “Just a nosebleed,” he said dispassionately. “They happen.”

“It’s the dry air,” offered Harry. When Umbridge narrowed her eyes at him, he continued reasonably, “My uncle lives in the high desert, he gets nosebleeds like every other day.”

“Are we in the high desert, Mr. Potter?” The words dripped off her tongue sardonically.

Harry remained unperturbed. “No, but maybe Draco’s just dehydrated.” He threw a casual glance over his shoulder, his voice absurdly innocent. “You should drink more water, man.”

“Yeah.” Malfoy was wiping at his face now with the back of his hand. “Good point.”

Umbridge still looked suspicious, but as absolutely nobody was giving anything or anyone else up, she redirected her vexation.

“Miss Granger, I’m not seeing much progress on these lines.” Her tone was dangerously sweet.

Hermione’s voice faltered as she replied, “No… I’ll… I’ll pick up the pace, I’m sorry.”

“Well, you’d better, because now you have two hundred more to do, in addition to the five.”

“What?!” exclaimed Hermione at the same time as Ron burst out, “What is your _problem?_ ”

“Excuse me, Mr. Weasley?” The glint in her eye was at odds with the even keel of her voice.

“You didn’t tell her to do five hundred by 10:30, you told her to do five hundred. We have five and a half more hours. She didn’t _not_ do what you told her to, so why are you messing with her?”

“Stop,” Hermione threw feebly over her shoulder at him, but she may as well have said nothing, for all everyone was focused on the exchange between the redhead and their jailer.

“Would you like to join her?” 

“What?” The heat ebbed rapidly out of Ron’s tone as he seemed to process the question.

“I said, would you like to join her?” The vice principal’s tone was disconcertingly indulgent, as if she were offering him some candy, rather than setting him a punishment.

“I… whatever, I don’t care.” But he said it sullenly, apparently caring very much.

“Good. I’ll have three hundred lines from you.”

Ron let out a little huff, shaking his head before clarifying, “So… I do three and she does four?”

“Oh, no. She’s doing seven; you’re doing three.”

His pink cheeks turning ever redder, Ron’s mouth fell open as if to protest, but Umbridge turned away from him and began writing at the top of the blackboard on the side wall:

_I must not confuse chivalry with insolence._

“Shut up,” he whispered to Harry as the latter shook with silent laughter behind the vice principal’s back, fist clenched against his mouth.

“I must say, Miss Granger,” began Umbridge in a lofty tone, brushing chalk dust from her hands as she resumed her position at the front of the classroom, “boys certainly do seem to like standing up for you. I wonder why that is.”

The implication lurking in Umbridge’s voice drew a soft, collective intake of breath in the room, an almost involuntary expression of tension and shock.

Harry’s knee bobbed up and down as he shook his head in agitation and clenched his fists. The other vice principal, McGonagall, was a hardass, but this woman was just a sadist. Unfortunately, it was her word against that of half a dozen confirmed troublemakers. Harry could have run that particular drill in his sleep.

Hermione had her hands clasped together in front of her mouth, white at the knuckles, and she seemed to just barely contain herself until fifteen seconds after Umbridge had left again, before she hurtled out of her chair, grabbed the bathroom pass, and disappeared through the door in tears. During those fifteen seconds, Harry had turned to mouth to Malfoy, _Not one word_ , but Malfoy had merely raised his hands and shaken his head.

An agonizing thirty seconds passed after Hermione’s departure, before Luna calmly rose from her seat and exited the classroom.

  


* * *

  


The tears were already flowing before Hermione set foot outside the classroom door, and it was all she could do to reach the bathroom and shut herself in a stall before breaking down completely. How much of this was any person supposed to bear?

Her entire life, she’d only ever done everything right, and it was falling completely to pieces faster than she could pick them up. Nothing would ever be good enough -- not for her parents, not for her peers, her boyfriend, teachers…

She was sixteen years old and so damn _tired_.

The sound of the bathroom door opening and closing with a jarring slam -- somewhere in time, a screw had fallen out of the resistance mechanism that was supposed to make the door close slowly, and nobody had ever bothered to fix it -- made her jump and draw a breath, trying to suppress her sobs. In an effort to regain control, she studied the graffiti covering the interior walls of her stall.

  
_Hogwarts sux_

_NT + CW_  
_4ever_

_Hogs Ladies B-Ball_  
_DREAM TEAM_  
_Angie - Alicia - Katie_  
_c/o ‘96_  
_CIF BABY!!_

  


_Oliver Wood_ was inscribed in a heart, and below it, in different handwriting, someone had added _is an asshole._

_MYRTLE WUZ HERE_ had been crossed out, and scrawled underneath was _Myrtle is A Skank_ , with an unflattering stick figure of a girl with large glasses.

Teenaged girls were really lovely sometimes. Almost as wonderful as teenaged boys.

She tried not to think about what was graffitied in the other bathroom, and more specifically, whether her own name was immortalized on a stall somewhere.

“Hermione?”

Even if she didn’t recognize Luna’s voice, there really was nobody else it could have been.

“I’m fine,” sniffled Hermione. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Luna did not respond, but Hermione also didn’t hear her leave, nor use the toilet nor the sink. This was really throwing a wrench in Hermione’s plans at the moment; if she couldn’t have her full cry out, she’d be liable to explode at any point for the rest of the day.

“I just need a minute,” she managed. “Can you please go away?”

But Luna did not go away, and Hermione wasn’t presently in any condition to be appreciative of whatever Luna was trying to do. Finally, Hermione flung open the stall door with an exasperated sigh. Luna was leaning against the wall, ankles crossed, disheveled blonde hair cascading artfully over her shoulders, humming to herself and looking for all the world as though this was a perfectly normal, relaxing place to be hanging out.

Hermione stared at her eyes in the mirror, already red and threatening to become swollen. She saturated a paper towel with cold water and pressed it to her face.

“That was horrible of her,” ventured Luna softly. “I’m sorry.”

Drawing deep breaths, Hermione did not reply.

“Why do you let it get to you like this when you know they’re in the wrong?”

Snatching the compress away from her face in shock, Hermione demanded, “Which part of it am I supposed to be okay with, exactly? The part where half the school is talking in detail about all the things I supposedly did with Cormac, or the part where an administrator just publicly accused me of being a slut?!”

“I don’t really like that word,” mused Luna thoughtfully. “It suggests there’s something wrong with girls who do it.”

“It doesn’t matter whether there is or isn’t, it’s what everyone’s thinking anyway.”

“You can’t let them define you.”

“What’s it to you, anyway?” Hermione demanded, feeling the sobs starting to rise again. “It’s literally none of your business.”

“I’m just trying to help. The more we act like these are bad things, the more power we give them. Believe me, I know it’s hard -- ”

“There is no way you understand how this feels! Last time I checked, your personal business wasn’t being broadcast all over the school!”

“Well, all that means is that you haven’t been paying attention,” said Luna curtly. For some reason, this only fueled Hermione’s fire.

“And I’m sorry, but I’m just trying to get through one day at a time here, it’s not up to me to lead the liberation movement! I didn’t ask for any of this! And what is _so wrong_ with me caring about my reputation?”

“Aren’t you just tired?” asked Luna, in a soft tone that threw Hermione completely off-kilter.

“What?”

“Aren’t you just tired? Worrying what people think of you? When you can’t do anything about it?”

“I don’t just live on my own planet, do I? There’s no point trying to act like it doesn’t matter what people think, because that’s all anything is ever about in life is what people think of you! It’s just day after day of being rated by other people, and you’re either good enough or you aren’t.”

She flung the paper towel into the trash with as much force and fury as she could summon and yanked open the door a little too hard, nearly falling over when it swung open easily. Righting herself again, she snapped, “And there’s _plenty_ I can do about it!”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I Believe I Can Fly" is a 1996 song by R. Kelly, and very popular around this time. There are a bunch of other 90's references in here, but I think they probably speak for themselves!
> 
> CIF is the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for California high school sports, and in context here (the graffiti on the bathroom stall) the acronym refers to the statewide championship tournament and/or title for a given sport.


	3. 12:00

**_12:00 PM_**  
  
  
When Umbridge returned and announced they had exactly forty-five minutes to eat the lunches they’d each brought, Neville raised his hand.

“Ms. Umbridge?”

“What, Mr. Longbottom?”

“I, um… I need to take my insulin.” When she did not respond, he elaborated, “My supply is in Miss Pomfrey’s office.”

Umbridge sighed, clearly inconvenienced by Neville’s medical needs. “Fine. Let’s go. Quickly.”

Malfoy took that opportunity to make an apparent bid for a moment of freedom. “Will we be able to get something to drink?”

“There’s a water fountain right by the bathrooms, you know that,” she replied.

“Someone plugged it up with gum.”

The drinking fountain had not, in fact, been plugged up with gum half an hour earlier.

The vice principal sighed again. “It’s always something, isn’t it? Fine, I’ll send a couple of you to the vending machines while I escort Mr. Longbottom to the office.”

“Ooh.” Malfoy stretched his hand in the air as far as it would go.

“Mr. Malfoy, do you think this is the time to be asking me to entrust you with other people’s money?”

Ron watched as Malfoy’s hand fell limply to his desk.

“Miss Granger,” decided Umbridge. “And Mr. Weasley.”

Malfoy wolf-whistled.

“Don’t push it, Mr. Malfoy.” Umbridge waited a moment while Hermione collected cash and drink requests from everyone, before adding, “And Miss Granger, resist the urge to tamper with any gradebooks on your way there.”

Ron stuck close to the wall as they trekked to the vending machines, leaving a distance almost the entire width of the hallway between himself and Hermione, skipping his fingers along the red and gold stripes that ran the length of the hall — insanely curious about the gradebook comment but wondering whether he’d be a dick for asking at this moment.

Before he could decide the answer to that, she spoke first.

“You have a brother who went to Harvard, right? What’s his name? Percy?”

He hesitated a second, taken aback. Aside from the occasional group assignments in some classes, and a brief period of time when she had helped him with math during peer tutoring in middle school, Ron didn’t think Hermione Granger had ever paid him any attention.

“Um… yeah, well, he goes there now. How did you -- ”

“Oh, well you know in freshman year I took pre-calculus? And there were a bunch of juniors in the class, your other brothers’ year — Fred and George?”

Ron chuckled, swatting at a flyer pinned to a bulletin board as he passed it. “Fred and George have definitely never taken pre-calc, or any kind of calc.”

“No, I know, but their friends were in the class and they would talk about them, and then they all knew Percy, too, because he was just a couple years ahead. And everybody talked about how he went Ivy, because I think it was only him and that girl Penelope Clearwater that year.” She fired this off rapidly, her eyes filled with excitement. “And then, you had another brother who went to MIT, right? I thought I saw him on the Wall.”

The Wall. Ron hadn’t realized anybody ever bothered to actually read the Wall. The Wall was… well… a wall, in the administration building, where the school displayed the names and years of alumni who’d gone on to the most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Bill Weasley, class of 1989, and Percy Weasley, class of 1994, had both been immortalized on the Wall.

“Yeah. Bill went to MIT.” He decided Hermione looked way too excited about this information.

“What about your other brothers and sisters? Where did they go?”

“Just one sister. Ginny. She’s younger, she’s a sophomore. Uh, Charlie went to UC Davis.”

“Oh.”

Ron was partially amused and partially annoyed by the disappointment in her voice. “They have a good veterinary program,” he explained.

And Charlie Weasley’s name may not have been emblazoned on _the_ Wall, but it was on _a_ wall -- in the gym, on CIF banners from 1990 and 1991, when the former point guard had led the Hogs to two basketball championships.

“Fred’s an electrician apprentice, and George works night crew right now over at the grocery store. My parents were pissed, actually. He probably could have done computer science. He can code and everything. They both can.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He hates school. Says if Bill Gates doesn’t need a degree, he doesn’t, either.”

Hermione looked scandalized for a moment but recovered.

“So, you’re, like… surrounded by geniuses, that’s amazing.” She seemed almost awestruck.

He felt a wry smile twist his face, noting her choice of words, and he threw her an amused glance accompanied by the lift of an eyebrow. “Yeah. I’m surrounded by them.”

She opened her mouth as if to respond but ultimately didn’t say anything. Her hair was falling out of its bun, and she extracted the rubber band from the tangled mess and began sweeping her hair back to redo it.

“That comment that Ms. Umbridge made,” he finally ventured. “It… _you_ weren’t the one who changed Snape’s gradebook, were you?”

Though she ducked her head, he could still see the color that had risen in her face, and he raised his eyebrows.

“How’d he find out it was you?”

She hesitated. “I told him. After…”

“After you saw him interrogating everyone else?” he guessed.

She nodded.

As far as Ron knew, Hermione took Snape’s advanced class but was his third period teaching assistant for introductory chem; when Ron was summoned to the classroom between periods the previous week, with no clue why Snape was accusing him of tampering with grades, she’d been sitting in a corner quietly doing some task or another. Harry had been waiting outside the classroom as Ron had left after repeatedly insisting he had no idea what Snape was talking about.

“So… what did you do, change a bunch of grades in different classes to throw him off?”

She nodded again, her eyes cast down to the floor.

A smile crept across Ron’s face again as he held open the door to the little atrium where the vending machines lived, next to a small patio that was reserved for use by the upperclassmen. “And it worked but you ended up just confessing anyway?”

“Yeah.”

He let out a laugh before his brows drew together. “So why’d Harry still get nailed for it, then?”

“I don’t know…”

“Hmm.” They fell into a tentative silence as Hermione began depositing coins and bills into the machine, making the selections, handing soda and water bottles one by one to Ron, who stowed a couple in his pockets and clutched the next couple in his left hand, feeling his palm begin to numb with the cold.

“Why’d you do it?” he asked as Hermione began to deposit coins for the fifth drink. She glanced up at him. “I mean… you’re like really good at everything, right, what was so bad about your grade that -- ”

“I got a B on a test,” she said quietly, and Ron couldn’t help laughing a little in astonishment.

“I’m sorry,” he said when her look became a glare. “It’s just… isn’t that still really good, especially for that class? Percy used to complain all the time about that class, he actually used to like science until Snape ruined it for him.”

“It’s still a B,” she responded tightly. “I thought I was doing really well, but it’s college level, and he grades on a curve, and… you know that girl Cho?”

“Yeah, she plays basketball with Ginny.”

“Well, it’s just really hard to beat her.”

Ron was wondering why she was trying so hard to explain herself to him when he’d just told her he knew the class was a beast, when she continued.

“But I… I didn’t know how to tell my parents. I couldn’t tell them. They expect a lot from me. And just… it’s college applications next year and...” She stooped to retrieve her 7-UP and held out her hands for the other bottles expectantly, asking when he gave her a quizzical look, “Aren’t you going to get anything?”

“Oh. Nah, I didn’t bring change.”

“Oh, well, I’ll spot you, I’ve got an extra dollar -- ”

His face warmed. “I’m good.”

She looked dubious. “You didn’t bring anything with you that I saw.”

“Forget it.”

She stared at him in frustration, digging in her pocket for more change. “Ron, tell me what you want or I’ll pick for you.”

After a second, he sighed and said, “Coke. And thanks. I’ll pay you back on Monday.” As Hermione did battle with a quarter that the machine refused to take the first three times, he ventured, “Would a B really have been that much drama?”

She shook her head irritably. “I got a B+ on a mid-term progress report once, in sixth grade, and we had to have a whole talk about it. My parents and me. It was a whole _thing._ It’s just not an option.” When she noticed him staring at her, she added, “Whatever, you obviously don’t get the kind of pressure I’m under. It’s not the same for you, you don’t have to care.” She punched the code into the machine with malice.

“Why’s that, again?”

She scoffed as if the question were ridiculous. “Well, you obviously don’t care about school, and don’t you take shop or something? It’s not like anybody expects — ”

“Me to do well?” he finished, trying to keep his tone light and amused, but probably failing.

“No,” she sputtered as the machine dispensed the Coke bottle with a dull thud. “That’s not what — ”

“Because I’m passing my classes without worrying about who I’m beating, I don’t really care about solving for x, and I hate writing essays that are longer than the poem I’m supposed to be talking about? Because I’m _surrounded_ by geniuses but I take shop? Which I’ve always had an A in, by the way.” 

Hermione’s face was bright pink as she handed over his Coke and took her own 7-UP, cracking the cap and twisting it back and forth nervously.

“I didn’t mean it like -- ”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“None. It’s just me.”

He nodded for a couple of seconds before drawing a breath. “You know… there’s only so many times you can hear your teachers say, _You know, Bill never struggled with this,_ or, _Oh, Percy Weasley’s brother, you’ve got a lot to live up to,_ before you feel like going completely nuts. And I wasn’t even in middle school yet. I hate numbers. I don’t want to be an engineer, and I don’t want to be a lawyer, and I guess I just… I don’t see the point in destroying myself over it.

“Percy gets these things where he… he can’t breathe, he looks like he’s having a heart attack. But it’s not a heart attack, it’s just him being so stressed out, they call it a ‘panic attack.’ He’s twenty, he’s probably gonna give himself a stroke, and he’s not even in law school yet.” He shrugged. “Screw that.”

A pregnant pause followed as Hermione bit her lip and looked up at him. Sensing that she was not about to say anything, Ron continued, baldly but without heat, “I’m not trying to live on the wrong side of town my whole life. My parents want better than that for me, and I hear about it all the time. Being a mechanic isn’t real sexy, okay, but I’m good at it for now. I’m not stupid, I’m just… good at different things. And I think it’s really messed up that we basically have to decide what we want to do with our lives when we’re _twelve_ and worry about how grades are going to affect us for the next seventy years. So, you know what? I understand pressure.”

“I’m really sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be. You don’t know me, you didn’t know.”

As they embarked on the trip back to the classroom, Hermione offered, “I failed my driving test the very first time.”

Ron cracked a smile.

“Parallel parking?” he asked at the very same time she said it, too.

They passed the rest of the walk in silence, until the door to the classroom was in sight and Ron asked, “What d’you think Umbridge meant about the thing with Malfoy and the money?”

“I don’t know.”  
  


* * *

  
  
After Ron, Hermione, and Neville had all returned to the classroom and everyone had broken out their lunches, Hermione approached the board, sandwich in one hand, to continue with her lines, but she paused when she touched the chalk to the board and turned to Harry.

“Harry? How did you get detention for changing Mr. Snape’s gradebook? I… I confessed to that after I saw him talking to you and some other people...”

“ _You_ changed Snape’s gradebook??” exclaimed Malfoy. “Oh, shit, Straight Edge.”

Harry ignored him, responding easily, “I figured you did. You kept looking at us weird when he was talking to me. And then he called me back in later and told me someone confessed.”

“So... why did you say earlier that’s what you’re here for?”

“Because it is.” He paused a second for effect. “Snape decided he thought I was trying to cover for you.”

She fumbled the chalk, letting out a bewildered _“What?”_

He shrugged. “I didn’t even know who’d done it. But the first time he accused me of being the one who did it, I didn’t deny it.”

“Why??” Hermione looked like her mind was racing.

“Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I did it or not, it doesn’t matter if I deny it or not. When they decide I’ve done something… that’s it. Been that way the whole time I’ve been at this school. Been that way before this school. After a while, there’s no point trying to argue it. I’m just gonna end up in here anyway.”

“You’re saying you just get punished for all this stuff you didn’t do, and you don’t even care? You’re just okay with being in trouble? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Swear to God, I didn’t do any of it. Not this year, anyway. But I can’t prove I _didn’t_ do it, and even if I could they wouldn’t listen or care. And I guess it’s sorta my fault, anyway, because it used to be that I _did_ do all the shit I got in trouble for. So.”

Apparently frustrated by this information, Hermione shook her head and began to redirect her attention to the board, but then she turned to him again. “So, you’re saying that fire alarm...?”

“Wasn’t me, I swear. But I was nearby, so…” He shrugged.

“What about gluing Zach Smith’s locker shut with contact cement?” asked Malfoy.

At that, Harry let out a genuine laugh. “That wasn’t me, but that was funny.”

Umbridge returned at 12:45 on the dot to make sure nobody was still eating or otherwise behaving like normal human beings, and after she’d gone, Hermione continued working on her lines, and Luna commandeered one section of the classroom where she paced and gestured, mumbling to herself, apparently rehearsing for the play that the drama club was putting on that night.

Having been spurred on by a parting comment from Umbridge about the status of the lines, Ron had worked halfheartedly at his own blackboard for about twenty minutes before putting down his chalk in frustration and returning to his desk. Minutes later, he had folded a paper football and flicked it to Harry, who obliged by turning his desk and flicking it back.

After a few of these passes, Ron ventured quietly. “Dude… do you really have money?”

Harry glanced over the top of his glasses as he balanced the paper football on its point. He did, in fact, have a trust, which his aunt and uncle had never been allowed to touch (the source of one of their many issues with him) -- but Harry didn’t think affirming its existence was going to be helpful at this moment.

“My parents had money.”

“That’s, like… a rich people thing to say.”

“Does it matter?”

Ron flushed. “I don’t know, I just thought…”

Harry figured he knew pretty well what Ron just thought.

“I’m way more like you than I am like them.” Harry’s eyes flicked to Malfoy, who had apparently been tracking this conversation.

“Oh, yeah.” Malfoy’s tone dripped with sarcasm. “Go on, let’s hear it. We’re all just total jerks because we had the audacity to be born into money. We’re all Dudley Do-Right over here, tying women to railroad tracks while twirling our mustache -- ”

“Snidely Whiplash,” interjected Neville.

“What?”

“The villain was Snidely Whiplash. Dudley Do-Right was the hero.”

Harry nodded his vague assent, glad for the change of subject. “He was a Mountie.”

“No,” protested Malfoy, “what are you guys smoking?”

“I think I know my _Rocky and Bullwinkle,_ dude,” said Harry. “Dudley Do-Right was the good guy.”

“It’s right there in his name,” Hermione pointed out over her shoulder.

Harry couldn’t resist adding, “He was kind of a pretty dumbass, though, maybe that’s why you identify with him.”

“Okay, you know what, whatever.” Malfoy crossed his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

But this all seemed to have jogged Ron’s memory about something. “Why’d Umbridge make that comment to you about taking people’s money?” he asked Malfoy.

“How should I know what her problem is?” was the sneering reply.

“‘How should you know what her problem is’? Give me a break, you know what you did to get in here. So what was it?”

Malfoy ignored him.

“Seriously?” Ron let out a laugh of disbelief. “You’ve been on everyone’s case all day, since the minute you got here, and now you’re gonna shut up? You’re so concerned about what everyone else here did -- ”

“You stole that student council fundraiser money, didn’t you?” interrupted Hermione suddenly.

Malfoy flushed and ran a hand through his hair.

“That was you?” Harry asked him. He’d heard things here and there about the money that had gone missing, though he didn’t know anyone with a reliable connection to what had happened.

When the blond boy continued to ignore them, Ron persisted. “You stole two hundred bucks? What, for the fun of it? It’s not enough you’re richer than like ninety percent of this school and drive a 3-Series -- ”

“Let’s be precise, okay,” retorted Malfoy with a pugnacious look, “it’s an M3.”

Ron laughed. “That’s not an M3, it’s a 3-Series with M3 badging. I’m sure most people think it’s an M3 if they don’t care what’s under the hood, but I could hear the difference between those machines from a mile away. You bought the cheaper wheels -- ‘cheaper’ obviously being a way relative term, by the way -- and then you added…” He trailed off, his brow furrowed like he was working out a puzzle. “Now why would you be trying to make people think you have more money than you actually have, when you _already_ have more money than God, and stealing what your dad probably makes in one hour?”

“Keeping up with the Joneses,” Harry pointed out.

Ron shook this off. “He _is_ the Joneses.”

Harry shrugged. “Or maybe he’s not.”

Ron’s face blanked for a moment, but then he slowly turned back to Malfoy. “Guess austerity sucks no matter who you are.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Malfoy in a hard voice that made Harry think Ron probably knew exactly what he was talking about.

“What happened? Daddy lose some investments?”

Malfoy looked murderous, but Ron continued, “You know, you’re unbelievable. You can still afford a Beemer, you’re obviously fine. You live over on the west side, right? So your house can probably fit three of mine. What the hell does downsizing look like for your family? A nice condo? A Lexus? But what, you think if you don’t drive a racecar you won’t be voted prom prince?”

“Don’t talk about shit you don’t understand. You have no idea what my life is like, and the people I hang out with, and what it takes -- ”

“Oh, you’re breaking my heart.”

“It’s not my fault I have money, it’s not my fault I live where I do, and it’s not my fault the people my parents hang out with and who their kids are, or what my parents expect for me! And you know what?” Malfoy’s jaw clenched before he opened it again. “Sorry I’m popular. Sorry people _like_ me. _Sorry_ I want to keep it that way. You act like I murdered someone because I play varsity and I have friends. You know, some people actually think those are _good_ things.”

“Well, that’s a really impressive argument, but I’m not about to be lectured on tolerance by the guy who asked me if my family gets extra food stamps.”

“It was a joke, dude.”

“Oh yeah? How about that time you asked me if my parents had to take out a third mortgage to send my brother to college?”

Malfoy intently traced his finger along the scratch marks on his desk.

“Did you forget about that one?” Ron asked in disgust. “Do you wanna guess what a fun conversation that was, when I was thirteen and asked my dad what a third mortgage was, and he wanted to know why?”

Malfoy lifted his face, which was wooden, and for a moment it seemed Harry could hear the individual breathing of every person in that room. Then, before anybody could say anything else, the baseball player jumped to his feet and strode out the door.  
  


* * *

  
  
**_1:38 PM_**  
  
  
Luna, who had spent the past forty-five minutes pacing one side of the classroom, script clutched in one hand, mumbling her lines to herself, had reached the point of diminishing returns, where any further rehearsal was just going to result in her mind playing tricks on itself. Her eye caught on Harry, who had recently located a box of pencils in a cabinet, sharpened them, and was now throwing them like darts at the ceiling, where he’d successfully managed to make half a dozen stick.

“Argus must hate you,” she commented in reference to the school janitor, sliding into the chair in front of his.

“Well, the feeling’s mutual.” He stuck another pencil. “And I have a reputation to keep up.”

“What changed?”

“Huh?” He wrinkled his nose as he launched another pencil, ducking and covering his head as the projectile fell short of its target and plummeted back towards him.

“What changed from last year to this year? You said you used to do all the stuff you got in trouble for, but you don’t anymore.”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

Luna was not convinced. “Does it have to do with the person you were talking about? The only one who cares about you?”

Harry made a frustrated sound as the next pencil bounced off the ceiling.

Luna hesitated. She never talked about this to anyone. But that was exactly the problem. She never talked about it to anyone. It was dangerous, and nobody could possibly understand.

Except maybe, somebody could.

“I was removed from my dad when I was nine,” she said, recalling it dreamily, as if it had happened in another life, or better yet, to a different person. It helped to say it like it was just another line in a script, something she connected with but hadn’t lived. “For half a year.”

Harry stared at her.

For a second Luna worried about what she was getting herself into -- that everything she’d worked so hard to preserve could come crashing down because of a stupid, sentimental whim -- but ultimately she figured (even though she felt a little bad thinking it) that if Harry Potter were to tell someone… well, who would believe him, anyway?

“My dad’s sick,” she said. “Sometimes his brain… well, he sees things in a way that aren't real. And he’s fine now, but back then it got bad for a bit, and they decided it wasn’t safe for me.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“She’s not around.” She shrugged. “I think it’s probably hard being married to someone like Daddy.”

Harry was staring at his hands, and Luna continued, “The reason I’m here is, I got in trouble for forging his signature on a permission slip for a field trip. We were at a musical and it was at night. Daddy didn’t know where I was, called the police, called the school. Except I hadn’t forged it. He had signed it, a while back. But he hadn’t taken his meds for a while, and he freaked out. It can affect his memory, among… other things. But as soon as they confronted me about him calling, I knew what was going on. I confessed to forging it.”

“To cover for him.”

“Yeah. Panicking, raving man can be delusional, but he can also be a scared dad who thinks his kid’s been abducted because she didn’t tell him where she would be. So that’s what I let them believe.” She looked at him. “Daddy has his bad days, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. But people don’t want to get that. They think they know what’s best for me.”

Harry blew out a breath. “How does he feel about you being in here because of that?”

“He doesn’t know. I mean, he knows I’m here, but I told him it was for some other reason. He doesn’t need to feel guilty.”

After a few seconds passed in silence, she smiled a little. “Best part is, I actually do sign his name on things all the time. I’m a really good forger.”

Harry responded with a grin. “I could’ve used your services a few years back. My aunt and uncle were assholes. That’s who I used to live with.”

“Who do you live with now?”

For a moment, he looked as if he were about to shut down, but instead he contemplated his palms as he answered. “My Uncle Sirius. Well, he’s not literally my uncle, he’s my godfather. He’s been trying to get custody for years. CPS finally decided to start paying attention to what was going on at my aunt and uncle’s house. Well… that, and my Uncle Remus moved out. For appearances.”

“Who’s that?”

“Uncle Sirius’s… _'roommate.'_ ”

Luna caught the inflection. “Yeah.”

The next question, Luna really asked out of inexcusable, morbid curiosity. “How is it that you ended up at St. Brutus’s? You don’t seem…”

Harry pursed his lips in a wry half-smile. “You can end up there if you’ve had problems with your other schools. Or, your parents or guardians can put you there. I was never a criminal before I went to that place.”  
  


* * *

  
  
Neville kept his eyes resolutely on his notebook when Draco re-entered the room and sauntered quietly back to his seat -- except the jock didn’t go back to his original desk; he took the one right next to Neville. In his periphery, Neville could see Draco sitting sideways in the chair, could see his leather shoe tapping slowly on the floor, could feel the cold eyes pondering him. Neville tried to shake off the feeling.

“That’s really good, man.”

“Huh?” Neville couldn’t help looking up.

“What you’re drawing.” Draco nodded at the sketch Neville was currently working on, a tall, square-jawed man in fatigues. “Who’s that supposed to be?”

Neville hesitated, adding some shading. “My dad.”

“He’s in the Army?”

“Reserve now, but yeah.”

“Is he a total hardass?”

Neville shook his head.

“How’d he feel about you getting busted? You get in trouble at home, too?”

With a little laugh, Neville shook his head again.

“Why’s that funny?”

The truth was, the only annoyance Frank Longbottom had expressed about this whole debacle was the school’s decision to punish Neville for what his dad resolutely called “boys being boys.”

That was all it ever was. Boys being boys. Kids being kids. Year after year, school after school, day after day of Neville coming home in tears because kids had a lot of creative ways of telling you they thought you were a total weirdo and a loser. And no matter how many platitudes adults seemed to have about not letting words hurt you, the truth was that the words were what lasted, even after the bruises had faded on the backs of your arms where someone had pinched you all throughout class (and you never said anything about it because all the teachers would do was tell _both_ of you to knock it off).

His dad had never been harsh with him, but there had always been a certain frustration in the way he tried to manage his son’s concerns, with suggestions like _Just try to make friends_ and _Just stand up for yourself_ \-- like Neville hadn’t already thought of that. And then there was the one that his father never said directly, but which Neville heard loud and clear anyway:

_Just try to be more normal._

Neville hadn’t hit Ted Montague to make his father proud. He hadn’t had any particular reason for it except that Ted had been coming at him again -- whether to shove him or just insult him, Neville had no idea, but all he’d known was that he just couldn’t take it anymore.

He wasn’t always bigger than Ted, not back in eighth grade, when he’d first transferred to this district. But even after Neville hit his growth spurt, Ted still saw the part of Neville that would always be small, no matter how tall he’d grown. And to Neville, Ted would always be huge.

But how in the world was he supposed to make the school understand that, when all they saw was Ted Montague with a bloody nose and Neville Longbottom -- all six feet of him -- who had done it?

The reason Draco’s question was so funny was that, while Neville actually felt _bad_ for what he’d done (he really didn’t want to hurt anybody, ever), it turned out that putting his fist in someone’s face -- motivated by nothing but blind terror -- was what had finally earned quiet, anxious, unathletic, geeky Neville Longbottom an ‘attaboy’ from his father.

“I think…” Neville swallowed. “I think it’s the first time he’s ever been proud of me in my entire life.”

“What?!”

The unvarnished shock with which Draco said it, made Neville look up again, and when he did, it was impossible to make out the look on the jock’s face.

“Forget it.” Neville turned the page in his notebook and began sketching a new figure.

“Why’d you say that, man?”

He was feeling sick to his stomach again, but even more unsettling was the tone of Draco’s voice, different than it really had been all day.

“Look, I…” He shrugged, concentrating on his drawing. For some reason it was harder to draw people sitting down than standing up. “I _think_ my dad loves me. In his way. But he just doesn’t… understand me.”

Draco did not respond.

“I think he’s always wanted me to be like… I don’t know, like _you_.”

He heard Draco laugh. “Exactly what part of me?”

“All of it, probably.” Neville made a face as he said it, eyes still on his notebook. Surely Draco knew that every single person at this school would have given anything to be him -- and, if Neville were honest, himself included.

“Would it help if I tell you that _my_ dad isn’t happy with any part of me?”

It sounded so sincere that Neville didn't even entertain the idea of questioning it as he lifted his eyes from his drawing.

“Probably not. Just makes it sound like we’re all screwed.”

It was the first time Neville had seen anything like kindness on Draco Malfoy’s face. “I think we are, dude.”

The silence that followed felt bizarrely easy as Neville continued to sketch, until Draco broke it again.

“Who’s that?”

Neville shrugged.

“Is that… wait, is that _me?_ ”

“No,” Neville lied.

“That is _totally_ me.” Draco’s voice was gleeful. “Look, you got my hair swoop all right and everything. That’s awesome, did you do anyone else, lemme see.”

Biting his lip, Neville flipped back a couple of pages.

“Is that Poetry Slam? Rad, you even did the ripped jeans and -- ”

“I think her name’s Luna,” said Neville pointedly, wincing as he anticipated the response.

But Draco merely paused for a moment before nodding and replying simply, “Luna.”  
  


* * *

  
  
Ron raised his eyebrows as Hermione took another break from her lines and slumped into the seat next to his.

“I don’t know which is worse, how tired I am from writing or how _bored_ I am,” she complained. “I’m going to be dreaming about nothing but that sentence for the next month.”

“Think that was probably her goal,” he commented, absently drawing a series of dots in his notebook. When he realized what he was doing, an idea hit him and he turned to a new page and began working as they talked. But first he glanced at her and caught the look that crossed her face at his comment.

“I think she’s humiliated just about everyone in here today,” he added. “It’s her thing, I guess. She really went at it with you, though.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Teachers always like me. I know what I did was wrong, but…”

“Think it’s like a ‘bigger they are, harder they fall’ thing. Or, I don’t know, _because_ you’re so perfect you’re a bigger target.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What are you doing?” She nodded at his notebook.

“You’ll see.” He stared at his handiwork. “What she said to you was really messed up. Earlier, before you ran to the bathroom.”

She stiffened.

“Are you gonna tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Are you serious?” He stared at her.

“It’s bad enough everyone else is saying it, without me having to say it out loud, especially now that even _adults_ are saying it…” She perked up when he scooted his desk closer to hers and slid his notebook towards her.

He indicated the grid of dots he’d drawn on the page. “Know how to play this one?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Ladies first?” He offered his pencil, which she accepted and drew the first line before handing it back.

They passed the pencil back and forth, drawing lines between the dots, occasionally completing boxes and penciling in an _H_ or an _R_ on the spaces they’d captured, until Hermione gasped as Ron took a series of four boxes in a row. 

“How did you -- I didn’t even notice you were setting that up! Oh, that was so stupid of me,” she protested as he laughed.

“Don’t you get tired of hearing it?” he asked abruptly a few moments later. “How do you not go off on people?”

She took two more boxes on the grid with movements slower than necessary. “What am I supposed to say?”

“That it’s all a lie? That you didn’t do it, and that they need to shut up about it?” Noting the look on her face, he caught himself, thinking maybe he’d walked himself right into a trap, adding, “ _Or_ that you did do it and it’s literally what everyone else does anyway, and that they need to shut up about it?”

“So you _do_ think I did it.”

“No! It’s just, I realized at first I said you didn’t, but how do I know, maybe you did, so I -- ”

“Yeah, why _did_ you assume that at first? Because it would be wrong if I _had_ done those things?” she hissed.

“No!” he insisted in a hushed tone. This was absolutely a trap, and he’d built it himself. “Look, I think there’s probably nothing I can say here that’s right, and all I meant was -- ”

“Well, same for me,” she fired. “I’m easy or I’m a tease. I lose either way.”

As Ron bent to retrieve the pencil that had fallen onto the floor during this exchange, she added heatedly, “I’m so tired of people telling me I should just not let it bother me or I should just go telling everyone what’s what. Do you think I haven’t thought of that? And I can’t just go losing it on everyone when they say things I don’t like, okay, because then on top of everything I’ll just be a bitch.”

“Well, you’re doing a pretty good job of it now.”

“Being a bitch?” she challenged.

“Nice try. I meant losing it on me.”

A crinkle formed between her eyebrows as she accepted the pencil from him again, her fingers brushing his. “Anyway, what do you care except that your girlfriend is with him now? Would you even bother to think what he’s done if she weren’t?”

“Ex-girlfriend,” he corrected, not breaking eye contact. “And for someone who probably wouldn’t give me the time of day under normal circumstances, you seem to have a lot of opinions about what I do and don’t care about.”

She stared at the game, looking for a second as though she might cry, but then she handed the pencil back. “It’s your turn, I finished.”

Ron drew a line and put his initial in the new box. “Cormac McLaggen is an asshole.”

She shook her head, placing her initials in two boxes she’d created. “I was supposed to go to the prom with him.” She scoffed.

“Why? He’d ruin the pictures.”

She giggled. Then she grew serious again.

“Know why he did it?” she whispered

Ron had a suspicion but he merely looked at her for the answer.

“Because I… because I wouldn’t…”

She didn’t seem able to finish, so Ron nodded and repeated, “Cormac McLaggen is an asshole.”

After a few more moves, and some battling with himself, Ron spoke up again. “You know… this morning, when Ms. Umbridge went into my backpack?”

Hermione blushed and tensed. “Yes…”

“Well. Those things were my friends’ way of… let’s just say my friends sometimes have some messed up ways of trying to tell me I need to… level up.” His face was a furnace as he took another row of boxes. “That’s why they were in my car.”

“I… don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

“Well, that’s at least one person, then.”

“Weasley.”

Interrupted in the process of contemplating his next move, Ron looked up warily in the direction of the voice. Arms crossed, barely looking at him, Malfoy gestured with a jerk of his head for Ron to join him in the far corner of the room. Ron’s eyes swept the room, taking in Neville chewing on his pencil, Luna sitting next to Harry twirling her hair absently, and Harry giving Ron a quizzical shrug.

Handing the pencil back to Hermione, Ron joked, “Don’t cheat,” before extracting himself from his desk and crossing the room in slow, measured steps. He stopped in front of Malfoy, who was concentrating on picking at a piece of paint peeling off the wall. It was a bizarre sensation that he never got used to, feeling smaller than a person who was nearly half a foot shorter than him.

Malfoy had one cheek puffed out as he appeared to be thinking. Ron stowed his hands in his pockets and his eyes caught upon a bit of dried blood on the other boy’s polo. Upon further reflection, Ron took a step back, just in case. Malfoy seemed to notice it and smiled ruefully.

“Relax, man.” He paused. “Can we go outside?”

Ron raised an eyebrow. “No.”

Malfoy rolled his eyes and blew out a breath. After what felt like half an hour, when Ron was on the verge of walking away again, Malfoy piped up.

“I didn’t realize you repeated any of that shit at home. A man… shouldn’t have to feel small in front of his father.”

“No,” Ron agreed ironically. “Just in front of everyone else.”

His face blazed as he felt the eyes of everyone in the room on him. He really wished he’d agreed to take this outside.

“Come on, man,” protested Malfoy. “I’m not trying to be a dick here.”

“Nah, you’re just naturally good at it.”

Malfoy’s cheeks were pink. “Look, I’m not gonna stand here and ask you to feel bad for me -- ”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t.”

He was met with a scoff. “Can you just… can you maybe just admit that you’re hellbent on assuming everybody has it better than you, right, everybody’s life is just so easy, just because they might be better at hiding their shit than you are? Because everybody doesn’t wear it like a fucking badge?”

“Well, I assume it because it’s true, and all the shit you talk isn’t exactly helping -- ”

“Oh my God,” interjected Harry (confirming, yes, everybody absolutely was listening to this exchange), “are you really sticking to that? After what I said earlier? Everybody has it better than you, huh? You got a pair on you, my friend. If I can go eight years without complaining about my _actual_ problems, you should be able to go eight hours -- ”

“Oh, you’ve had a difficult life, and therefore nobody else can have any problems, ever?” demanded Malfoy. “Look, man, I’m sorry about your parents, but that doesn’t mean -- ”

“Going down this road again,” muttered Harry almost as if to himself, but he glared at Malfoy as he hauled himself to his feet. “You’re not gonna like what you find -- ”

“Oh, will you all just cut it out?!” Hermione actually stamped her foot in punctuation. “You’re being ridiculous! Driving me crazy and doing a really great job of proving exactly why you’re in here in the first place, I wish you’d all just shut up already -- ”

“You’re very judgmental, you know that?” mused Luna.

“I am _not,_ and don’t get me started on -- ” 

“Please.” Ron rolled his eyes. “You’ve made it pretty clear all day that you think you’re a cut above the company here.”

“I have not!” She glared at him.

“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows. “What would happen if any one of us walked up to you on campus during the week? Well, I don’t know, probably you’re allowed to talk to him.” He jerked his thumb at Malfoy. “And maybe he’s allowed to talk to you, too, I don’t know -- ”

“If by ‘talk to me’ you mean insult me, then yes, apparently he is allowed to talk to me.”

Ron persisted. “But what if Harry asked you to hang out with the skaters? Think hard before you answer, most of them aren’t going to Harvard.” Hermione gaped as he continued. “What would you say if I walked up to you in the hall, when everyone else is around?” 

She held his eyes for a few seconds even after Harry chimed in: “Yeah, what if Neville asked you to play D&D during lunch some day?”

“It’s Magic, actually…” clarified Neville.

“Well, what about you?” shot Hermione at Harry. “I don’t see _any_ of you talking to Luna and her friends at lunch -- "

"I'm not too concerned about it, honestly; I don't need people to like me," said Luna in a tone that seemed a _bit_ superior.

"Yes," replied Hermione scathingly, "we know. You're _so_ above it all, _nothing_ bothers you. Give me the magic spell for that, because I _wish_ I didn't have to be worried about anything -- "

"I'm worried about plenty, I just choose not to get caught up in what people think of me."

"I don't _choose_ to -- "

Malfoy spoke up. “I’d actually like to hear anybody in here deny that they think they’re better than everyone else, or that their problems are bigger.”

“You included?” Ron asked pointedly.

Malfoy simply shrugged one shoulder in concession.

In the still that followed, Neville offered quietly, “I think you’re all really cool…”

Pointing at Neville, Malfoy amended, “Okay, Longbottom’s a solid fucking dude, but I dare the rest of you to deny it.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CIF is the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs California high school sports, and the acronym also refers to the championship tournament and/or title.
> 
> Dudley Do-Right is a cartoon character who also appeared in segments of the cartoon program _Rocky and Bullwinkle,_ along with his nemesis Snidely Whiplash.
> 
> Ron and Hermione are playing dots & boxes, a strategy game using pen(cil) and paper.


	4. 2:26

**_2:26 PM_**  
  
  
With less than two hours to go, Hermione looked close to tears, having covered barely half the blackboard so far with tiny sentences. Neville hadn’t counted them, but apparently she had been, and it wasn’t looking good -- unsurprising, considering the number of lines Umbridge had assigned her was basically impossible unless you were a robot or were otherwise okay with losing blood flow to your hand.

Ron was angrily scrawling his own lines at the side blackboard, jabbing the chalk so hard on the period at the end of each sentence that he was liable to snap it completely in half.

Suddenly, without preamble or ceremony, Luna rose calmly from her seat and joined Hermione at the board, where she picked up a piece of chalk and stood silently, observing Hermione as she wrote her next two lines. At the conclusion of those two lines, Luna lifted her own hand and began a new column next to where Hermione was working -- her handwriting almost a perfect match.

“You don’t have to do this,” protested Hermione.

Luna simply continued with the task.

Neville’s eyes darted between where Hermione and Luna stood writing at the front of the room, and where Ron was working a few feet away. Neville made three false starts before finally taking a breath and hauling himself out of his seat, joining Ron at the board and taking up his own piece of chalk.

“What are you doing?” muttered Ron.

Neville hesitated for a moment before replying, in a voice that was quiet but steady: “Leave no man behind.”

With that, he started in on his own column of lines next to Ron’s: _I must not confuse chivalry with insolence._ Neville’s handwriting did not look like Ron’s, exactly, but they were both seventeen-year-old boys, which meant in the end their writing was chicken scratch anyway -- and add to that, the fact that handwriting on a blackboard was always messier than on paper if you weren’t used to doing it, further obscuring any significant distinction between the two boys’ chalkmanship.

Several more moments passed in silence, save for the _click, clack,_ and occasional _squeak_ of chalk against the boards, before Luna spoke again, her voice soft and unassuming.

“Harry? You’re not busy, are you?” She glanced over her shoulder, and Neville followed her gaze.

Harry wrinkled his nose, his brow furrowing. “I’m not doing Hermione’s lines, my writing doesn’t look anything like hers, anyway.”

“All right,” replied Luna, her tone placid and unconcerned.

Thirty seconds later, Harry’s arrival at the blackboard was preceded by an impressive sigh. “Fine. How do you think this is going to work, exactly?”

“Hermione,” said Luna, “stop writing in columns -- write your next line right next to the one you just did, and keep doing that across the board. And make your writing even messier, like you’re tired.”

“I _am_ tired,” muttered Hermione. “And we’re all going to get in trouble for this.”

“You were going to get in trouble anyway for not finishing these. It’s our business whether we get into trouble, too.”

A tiny sound of cynicism escaped Hermione, but she did as Luna suggested, and as she did so, Luna began following in Hermione’s wake, writing her own perfectly replicated lines directly below Hermione’s, with barely an inch of space between them.

“Harry, write yours in the spaces.”

“You won’t even be able to read it,” he protested, “my handwriting’s awful.”

“Yes, everybody’s handwriting is awful after they’ve been writing cramped little lines for hours. But you’re really just filling space, and Hermione and I are going to write messier, too.”

Harry did as he was told, his writing sandwiched between Hermione’s and Luna’s increasingly sloppy cursive, and when Hermione reached the end of the board she circled back to the left and started a new set of lines crossways, squashed up against the completed row above -- as did Luna and then Harry after her.

Not two minutes into this, all five students at the boards had paused in their efforts — one by one, like dominoes — and turned to stare at Draco.

“What?” he challenged, arms crossed as he slouched in his seat. But he didn’t hold out for long before joining Neville and Ron with a little huff.

“You know,” he said fairly as he scrawled his own contributions, “we wouldn’t be doing this if you could just keep it locked up around authority figures. I talk a lotta shit, but I’m smart about it.”

Ron pursed his lips as he wrote. “Yeah, well, while we’re talking hypotheticals, if you were anyone else, you’d have been arrested for what you did, not in detention. And if anything worked the way it was supposed to, probably half the people in here right now wouldn’t be here.”

“You supposed to be one of ‘em?”

Ron shrugged. “I did what I did.”

“Which was?”

“Well. I found an old paper my older brother wrote for Snape’s intro chem class a few years ago. The assignment hasn’t changed between then and now. I rewrote it in my handwriting and turned it in.”

“And you got busted?”

“I got a C+.”

Draco stopped writing. “I don’t… what am I missing?”

“You’re missing the part where he’s an arbitrary bastard and gave me a C on a paper that should have been an A _because he already gave it one_ back when Percy submitted it.”

“And I’ll bet you complained about it, didn’t you? And told him exactly what you’d done.”

Ron tried to suppress a smile, and Draco shook his head.

“Man, we really gotta work on your mouth.”

Something Ron had said jogged Neville’s memory, and he blurted out suddenly, “Dick Dastardly!”

He looked at Draco, who responded with a bewildered, “What??”

“Dick Dastardly.”

“Am I supposed to know what that is?”

“Think he’s calling you a dick,” offered Ron wryly.

“No,” protested Neville. “Earlier you confused Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash, and you were _probably_ thinking of Dick Dastardly, who _was_ a villain and also has the same initials.”

“Who?”

“Dastardly and Muttley,” said Ron with a nod.

“Same people who did Yogi Bear,” agreed Luna.

“Flew airplanes,” said Harry. “Dog wore flight goggles.”

_“Muttley, doooooooo somethinnnng!”_ mimicked Ron.

_“Yeahyeahyeah!”_ growled Harry in a cartoonish voice, leading Ron to double over with laughter and Draco to say, “That’s it, you guys are freaks.”

“Eh, I bet there’s something weird about you,” said Harry.

“Bet there’s not.”

“I once decorated our Christmas tree in nothing but radishes,” mused Luna, almost as if to herself.

“I think the word ‘broom’ is fake,” said Harry. “Like it sounds weird if you say it enough times.”

“Broom,” murmured Ron. “Broom. Brooooooooom. Huh.”

“I hate the smell of grass,” was Hermione’s contribution.

“I don’t like my food to touch on my plate,” said Neville quietly.

“I get wigged out by toilet paper with designs on it,” said Ron, completely deadpan. “I just think it’s really unnecessary.” Harry let out a laugh ending in a snort.

Draco tossed his piece of chalk in the air a few times before venturing thoughtfully, “I spend a lot of time wondering why snakes don’t have legs.”

A fit of giggles overtook the room.

“What -- wait -- ” Ron tried to get his laughter under control. “Like how much time are we talking about?”

“I don’t know, enough? Don’t you ever think about it?”

“No…”

“Bet you will now."  
  


* * *

  
  
**_3:42 PM_**  
  
  
“Okay, your turn.”

“Hmm… favorite movie?”

_“Beauty and the Beast,”_ said Hermione.

_“Star Wars,”_ said Neville.

_“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,”_ said Draco.

_“Bambi,”_ said Harry. Five heads turned to stare at him, but he shrugged. “Did I stutter?”

_“Goonies,”_ said Ron.

_“Citizen Kane,”_ said Luna loftily. Then, when everyone raised their eyebrows, her mouth quirked in a little half-smile and she said, “Just kidding. _Dr. Strangelove.”_

With fifteen minutes left to go, all six students were once again working at the boards, and during the lull that followed their answers, Hermione let out a frustrated growl about the status of her lines. She’d rejected offers by Neville and Draco to help, insisting that it would become too apparent that the writing wasn’t hers, paranoid enough about the help from Harry and Luna.

“I’ll never finish this.”

“I don’t think she ever meant you to be able to finish it, honestly,” said Luna. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. Just do the best you can.”

Hermione looked entirely dissatisfied with that take on things, but as Luna had said, there was nothing else to be done about it.

“How’s it going over there?” Harry asked Ron. 

“I don’t even know anymore. It’s all starting to blur, honestly.” He set down his chalk and pondered the board for a second. “That’s it, guys. Chill. You’ve done enough. Thanks.”

“You know what?” Harry slammed down his own chalk, and Draco watched warily as Harry crossed the room to where a large roll of white butcher paper was affixed to the wall, and he pulled down several feet before riffling through Mr. Vector’s desk.

“Uh, what are you…” Draco trailed off as Harry produced a large marker.

“I’ll give her lines,” seethed Harry, scrawling a line of text across the top of the paper. By this time, his antics had drawn everyone’s attention. He printed a second line in large, angry block letters, and when Draco glanced back at Ron he saw a grin spreading across the redhead’s face.

Harry stood for a second, pondering, and he’d just begun to raise the marker again when Draco tapped Harry on the shoulder and plucked the marker from his hand.

On the one hand, Draco failed to see how they _weren’t_ going to land in a world of shit for this. On the other, arguably they were already there, and would still be even after walking out of this classroom.

Before that day, being subjected to the vice principal’s snide comments aimed at humiliating each and every one of them indiscriminately, it had never occurred to him how much power the Dolores Umbridges of the world (or, an unwelcome voice whispered, the Lucius Malfoys) seemed to derive from the simple act of encouraging kids to hate each other. The most mind-bending thing about it was the fact that they didn’t even hide it.

Between that and snakes without legs, he was in for a lot of lost sleep over the coming week.

If he were totally honest, he wasn’t anywhere near ready to overhaul the entire system, but as he printed a line below what Harry had written, he thought maybe this would do for now.

When he’d finished, he capped the marker, avoiding looking anyone in the eye, and held it out to Harry -- but it was Hermione who took it, followed by Luna, then Neville, until at last Ron stood before the butcher paper clutching the marker in his hand. He cast an expressionless glance at Draco before scrawling his own contribution at the bottom and returning to his seat. Harry re-furled the paper so that the message was hidden in the roll.

By this time, it was five minutes to four, and the situation suddenly felt quite surreal, like a hazy dream, as Draco and the others resumed their own seats. They sat once again in awkward silence waiting for the door to open one final time.

“Guys, what happens on Monday?” Hermione blurted out, and her voice seemed to ring throughout the space.

But before anyone could answer, the door was flung open.

_“Hem hem._ Well, I hope you’re all satisfied with the time and resources that have been expended here because of your actions. I’m sure this is exactly what your parents all had in mind when they paid their taxes this year.”

Nobody responded, and she threw a cursory glance at each of the blackboards but — miraculously — made no snide comments about the completion (or lack thereof).

Except it wasn’t miraculous; not really, now that Draco thought about it in hindsight. Of course she wouldn’t waste her own time standing there counting out seven hundred or even three hundred individual lines. Hermione, Ron, and the others had numbered them, the usual practice, but sneakily skipped a number here and there. Umbridge might have caught it if she’d looked closely, but due to the sheer number of lines the writing was so damned cramped on the boards it was almost painful to look at.

She returned everyone’s confiscated property with an air of benevolence that suggested she was providing charity instead of what already belonged to them, excusing them from detention one by one as she went. And one by one, they left without a backwards glance, though every single one threw out a “Break a leg, Luna” on their way out.

Ron earned himself another detention before his ass had left his seat, by innocently responding, “You can keep ‘em if you want,” when Umbridge tried to return his condoms, and Draco bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

The last to be excused, Draco jogged to catch up with someone before he reached the parking lot, backpack swinging from his right shoulder, letterman jacket clutched in his left hand. It was well into the eighties and bringing the jacket today was among some of his stupider decisions recently.

“Longbottom.”

Neville turned, a slightly surprised look on his round face.

“Montague’s been talking a lotta shit, you know?”

Neville shrugged the straps of his backpack closer to his neck but said nothing.

Draco shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Look. I know he’s been talking about next week. Rematch and everything. So… look, if you wanna handle your own business, I respect that, but if you… If you wanna be around some people who won’t let him fuck with you… You know where I hang out? At lunch and after school?”

“Yeah. South side of the quad.”

“Yeah.”

Neville stared at him warily. “You’re not…”

“Well… Look, dude, I can’t invite you to hang out with us, I mean… You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know how it is.”

“But… if you were to hang out, like, _around_ there, my guys won’t mess with you. I’ll see to it. And then if Montague tries to start shit, we’ll get involved.”

“Yeah? How’re they gonna feel about that?”

“They’re gonna feel however I tell ‘em to feel. And you know, Greg and Vince don’t really need a reason to lay someone out, no matter who it is.”

Draco had a hard time reading Neville’s response.

“Up to you,” he hedged. “It was just an idea.”

“Honestly? I don’t know if it’s worse for you to mess with me or for you to think I’m some pitiful loser who needs protection.”

Draco had thought he was doing an actual good thing, but now he wasn’t so sure. 

But if there was one thing he could understand, it was pride.

“Don’t think of it as protection,” he offered. “Think of it as backup. Everyone needs it sometimes.” With that, he dug his sunglasses out of his backpack. Putting them on, he clapped Neville on the shoulder and then gave him his space.

“Catch ya later, buddy.”

  


* * *

  


Hermione fumbled with the lock on her bike, filled with dread at the prospect of walking through her front door and facing what awaited her there. She’d been somewhat shocked to discover no messages on her pager at the end of detention, knowing full well that Umbridge had made good on her promise to contact her parents, but the situation was definitely more ominous this way. It all felt like a terrible dream.

“Hermione?”

She looked up and there was Ron, backpack slung over one shoulder, one hand on the strap and the other stowed in his pocket, squinting a bit against the late afternoon sun.

He hesitated under her expectant gaze, even while she remained crouched next to her front tire.

“So, look. Um. I have — ”

The honk of a car horn thirty yards away prompted him to whip around and hold up a pleading finger to an idling muscle car.

“Harvard,” he explained, turning back to Hermione and jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Anyway. Look. This is weird, but… well, I bought prom tickets. And Lavender’s obviously… well, you know. And it’s not like they’re returnable, and they weren’t cheap.” He flushed pink as Hermione slowly stood. “And someone may as well get some use out of them. I mean, I assume you got a dress and everything and now that you’re not…”

“Are you offering me a pity prom ticket?”

“I’m offering you a friendly prom ticket, otherwise it’s going in the trash.”

“Is this… a pity _date?_ I mean, I take it you’re still using the other one?”

He colored more deeply. “Well, no, you don’t have to go with me. I mean, I don’t mind if you do, you could go with me but not _with_ me, if you want. Or not at all. I was gonna go because my friends will still be there, and I already paid for the stupid thing. I might not stay the whole time.” He rolled his eyes when his brother honked again. “Jesus, Percy…”

Spinning around, he lifted his palms in agitation before turning to Hermione once more, muttering, “Brother’s a sociopath…”

“Anyway,” he continued, “I just thought… well, it’s shitty what he did to you, and then he still gets to go and act like there’s nothing wrong. I just thought that, I don’t know… you deserve a chance to show ‘em they didn’t break you. If you want it.”

She looked at the ground for a long moment.

“Forget it, I’m sorry — ”

“I might be grounded?” she interjected. “I’m not sure. I’ve… never been grounded. My parents are gonna be pissed. I don’t know how long I’ll be in trouble.”

After a second’s hesitation, Ron shifted his backpack forward and dug in the front pocket, producing a pen. Then he reached out and, meeting no protest, took her hand and wrote something there as she waited wordlessly. When he released her hand, scribbled there in black ink at the base of her thumb, was a phone number.

“When you find out, let me know.”

“Okay.” She smiled a little, and he looked like he was trying to suppress one but doing a terrible job of it.

With a nod, he made to leave but then added, “Oh, I wish I could offer you a ride home, but I can’t fit your bike, sorry.”

“No, that’s okay.”

Their attention was drawn to the clatter of Harry sliding on his skateboard down the handrails of the few steps that led down to the parking lot, his wheels touching down on the concrete with a smart smacking sound.

“Want a ride?” called Ron.

“Nope. Heard your brother grinding your transmission this morning. My ears’ll bleed if I have to hear any more of that — good God.” Harry stopped abruptly as a bubblegum pink car drove by, Vice Principal Umbridge behind the wheel.

The three watched as she exited the lot onto the street, her license plate frame the last thing they saw:

MY OTHER CAR  
IS A BROOMSTICK

  


* * *

  
  


**_Monday, 9:48 AM_**  
  
  
All that Mr. Vector’s second period math class was really expecting Monday morning was to complete a statistics project, which by all accounts should have been a criminally boring experience. Divided into groups already, they waited with varying degrees of attentiveness as Mr. Vector explained the assignment and readied himself to hand out large swaths of butcher paper for the students to prepare presentations for the rest of the class. 

“ — and then on the y-axis I’d like you to — Oh, my!”

Gaping, Mr. Vector stepped back from the paper he had just unrolled, which now swayed cheekily in a breeze of whispers and giggles. The laughter and glee rippled throughout the room as his students gawked at the unfurled message emblazoned in marker:

**V.P. UMBRIDGE WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW:**

RON WEASLEY IS A GODDAMN GENTLEMAN 

HERMIONE GRANGER IS A HUMAN BEING

LUNA LOVEGOOD IS GENUINE

NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM IS A HERO

HARRY POTTER IS A REALLY NICE GUY

DRACO MALFOY IS A RIGHTEOUS MOTHERFUCKER

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines_ was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. One of Dastardly's catchphrases was, "Muttley, doooooo something!"
> 
> _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ was written/ produced/ directed by John Hughes -- who also did _The Breakfast Club._
> 
> Ron's line about "show 'em they didn't break you" is a variation on the famous line from _Pretty in Pink,_ yet another John Hughes movie.
> 
> * * *
> 
> To my surprise, as I usually am not into AU, I thoroughly loved writing this. It was an amazing exercise in characterization. I'd love to hear from you! <3


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